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Patent Filings / US District Court Docket / US Court of Appeal Docket / Court Evidence Exhibits

Try the new hyperactive nonfiction fiction book from the inventor of scaled imaging and video.  Learn the truth about how America became Nazi America and how these "Holy Grail" technologies may be the key to stopping the corruption in our government.

"The Fight for the Grail"
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WHY INVENTORS NEED CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTION

Question : What does it take to get constitution protection of basic and fundamental civil rights in America or be put in a witness protection program in this country when trying to expose corruption in the government, at least for your wife and children after all of the following actions are taken against you?

·        Your family’s minivan being bombed with a bomb so powerful it blew up three cars next to it.  An hour before your family was to be driving in it.

·        Death threats from your former President & COO, Brian Utley made on behalf of law firms Foley and Lardner and Proskauer Rose, LLP, that if the crimes were exposed to authorities that your family would be murdered.

·        Patents, trademarks and copyrights stolen from you

·        Millions of dollars of investors monies stolen from your company, including monies from the SBA through SBIC loans

·        The destruction of your life.  Being forced to flee with your family for over 6 years, moving into hotels at first to hide and build a case, then running from home to home, back and forth between Florida and California 4 times, attempting to expose the crimes and pleading for justice, all the while fearing for the lives of your wife and children

·        Dastardly acts by your former attorneys, or former mobsters disguised as attorneys to destroy the evidence of their crimes against you, worse yet, their crimes against the United States.  Using a system of Racketeering and Public Office Abuse to turn law against you, justice against you, the courts against you and block due process and procedure of the complaints filed against them and the investigations ordered of the matters.

·        Destroying your ability to earn a living, destroying your ability to relax and enjoy your infant children, heaping pressure after pressure on your marriage, your friendships and overall ability to live life; denied of life, liberty and the pursuit of anything sane. 

·        The FBI and US Attorney’s office losing your case files not only for the Iviewit matters but the attempted murder and car bombing

·        Court ordered investigations derailed that would have blown the lid off and perhaps ended the nightmare

The time for the government to protect you is once the system of justice not only fails to uphold constitutional mandates to you protect but denies you both civil and criminal legal remedies and instead violates law, denies due process and procedure and acts as accomplice to the crimes against you.  In the Iviewit matters it is crazy as those entrusted with the administration of law and protecting the Constitution are found abusing their public offices to effectuate crimes.

WHEN WILL JUSTICE BE SERVED IF JUSTICE HAS CORRUPTED? 

When the attorneys and other criminals named herein are tried through due process and procedure.  When the denial of due process through violations of conflicts of interest and violations of public offices by those entrusted to uphold law are stopped.  When those corrupted few, charged with upholding law and admonishing Justice, stop trying to rewrite the Constitution to protect their criminal activities and shield themselves from prosecution of their crimes when caught.

Only when those involved in these matters are tried for treasons for their crimes against the United States and foreign nations.  Tick Tock

From the Pre Bush Constitution of the United States

Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8

"Congress shall have the power ... to promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts, by Securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their Respective Writings and Discoveries."

Those words protect inventors' inventions and are fundamental to free commerce, unless:

The criminals disguised as lawyers and public officers have also taken over Congress and try to remove Article 1 from the Constitution, which with this Administration of Corruption seems high on their agenda.  Hey - what is this Patent Act reform HR 1908

Or

They attempt to rewrite laws to escape prosecution for their crimes, like for example with Enron, Halliburton, Oil Price Fixing, War Crimes and Human Torture violations, all of which they are in the process of doing to usurp the Constitution to make it an instrument of crime.

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recent filing against Rumsfeld and others for war crimes and violations of human torture treatises, check out who filed it and who joined

FILING ON WAR CRIMES

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Far fetched this all seems, especially where the technologies invented by the Iviewit Inventors was the catalyst, the fire starter to tip the scale to these cults.  With this Administration and all the scandals erupting around them, their failure as public servants to answer to Congress, their lies to Congress, their violations of laws, war crimes, human torture, their taking the fifth, refusing subpoena's and all these other secret agenda's becoming public, it will certainly cause one to wonder if and how all these crimes are inter-related to the crimes against Iviewit starting back in 1997, including the election fraud which allowed criminals to seize America.  A historical reminder to all those involved in the treasonous plot to overthrow America, as will be further defined herein, once a corrupt government or legal system is uncovered and exposed to the People, which is already happening as the onion peels, the People will take pitchfork to all those involved or floggings are historically big.

Once the pitchforks are firmly planted in the foreheads of the guilty, the People will take all they have gained while abusing their civic duties, the true "Evil Doers" of Democracy quashed, as the Constitution demands.  As they plead for mercy, pitchfork in head, begging for mercy from the angry mob, citing how the new laws they changed to allow their crimes against the People, the People will no longer buy the spin (a clever old trick that historically fails), the final thrust of the pitchforks will be levied for the death blow.  Once dead the laws will be changed back over their dead bodies.  Tick Tock.

Personally, as American's we have never been into violating treatises like the Geneva Convention and nor would we allow our government to do such but this government you must keep in mind is a body of corrupt individuals who have seized political power by corrupt elections and illegal choosing of our Decider by our Supreme Jokers at the Supreme Court, who have picked the worst President in the history of America.  That is because it will become evident herein, that they were placed in power awaiting this day to take over the Constitution, to rewrite it to their will and a secret agenda, an agenda that works to undermine Democracy.

Once in power these subversive cult members needed to take the public eye off their crimes and disguise their actions in patriotic terms, they needed to frighten you into allowing you to surrender your Freedom, so their dictatorship could work.  Freedoms that American's have died for since the beginning to give you, you surrendered like fucking Wussie's, sheep, in fear of a small group of thugs. Guys on fucking camels with pea shooter rifles, with NO army, NO country, NO shoes, dressed in sandals only, NO Kevlar, NO Hummies, NO F-16's, all they got is a catchy name of "Terrorists", so as to fool any idiot incapable of thinking for her/himself, that they are in real (yellow green red) dangers.  Terror mind you is not the name of an enemy but the name given to normally oppressed people to fight the "MAN", as the man oppresses and uses large scale might against those resigned to acts of terror with civilian casualty.  Thus, America is guilty of terrorist tactics in fighting to free ourselves of oppression, yet they appear hero's of freedom because every idiot knows there is no land called Terror, there is no army called Terror, there are no such things as Terrorists to fear, sure there will always be the oppressed fighting oppression, as long as manunkind exists to oppress but should we side against those fighting against oppression, then evil will win???  Use your fucking heads you dumb ass shit heads of America, the terrorists are the guys who are ruining our country from within, those subversive cultists who have seized power and are changing laws and rules to the benefit of themselves.  We have problems but it is not the stooges of Bush I, his buds Bin Laden or Osama, it is the group of people like Bush I and Bush II and Reagan, all who have just a little bit to much invested in oil and war companies to stop the problem, in fact they fuel it and dumb ass American's who seem to accept shit shoved down their throats buy it without wondering why no one is questioning it.  Ask any American, would you surrender rights in the Constitution because of guys on camels?

So it is that we live with a flunky generation of pussy apathetic American wimps who are brainwashed to accept what ever CNN puts in your cup, you should be ashamed of yourselves because you will become the wimpiest most pathetic excuse of American's ever, unless when you learn to understand what this is all really about and how it came to be, you come out with vengeance, not pardons, pitchforks.  Pitchforks supplied free on Iviewit, call to pick one up.

 How could America surrender freedom, when we fought major super powers with major armies and surrendered none of what we have today in the name of a deck of card terrorists.  For Shame America!  Osama Bin Laden, George Bush I funded him into place and who would sell their freedoms to some little dicked terrorist, not even if the Russkies dropped a hundred bombs, even nukes should we sell out our freedoms.  What happened to die for country?  Now that is patriotic, not letting a misnomer of legislation aptly titled the Patriotic Act, remove personal freedom for fear of a propagandized threat of nobodies.   No, the real threat is to country as you will learn herein, as the whole world other than Americans already sees, comes from the "terrorists" running our country.

The Iviewit story is now less about the stolen patents and more about the attempt of the Administration of Corruption and some very powerful legal fellows, all aligned with secret cults like Skull and Bones and the Federalists, who are attempting to take over America now that they have total control after planning this immediately after the fall of Hitler.  Iviewit exemplifies the corruption and reveals amongst their growing list of crimes against the People, they are funding their endeavors by robbing the Patent Office and the Commerce Department, the countries greatest source of revenue.  The crime show how this Administration is stealing personal property as their own, as your Deciders and with no worries since they have usurped the laws and check and balances instituted to protect your personal property rights.

ONE MUST NOW ASK - WHY IS INVENTION SO IMPORTANT TO OUR COUNTRY WITH THE WEIGHT OF THE ENTIRE CONSTITUTION BEHIND IT? 

Why, because it is the root that is fundamental to free commerce that our democracy is founded upon.

Otherwise everything invented and the royalties derived from inventions would be owned by the King/Decider/Dictator and his crooked lawyers and court of jesters, not the inventors who invented them.  Therefore, invention which yields rights and royalties under the Constitution of yesteryear, is fundamental to personal property rights, another key factor of democracy.  Nowhere will you find that royalties under the Constitution should pass in any way to ones lawyers or the government or the Decider, as was almost the case with Iviewit and currently is the case.  It is clear that the Constitution grants those to rights and royalties to the inventors of the Intellectual Property for the reason that without it democracy and free commerce are worthless. 

WHY IS INVENTION SO IMPORTANT THAT THE FOUNDERS PUT THE JOB OF THE INVENTOR, EVEN LITTLE OLD MA AND PA INVENTORS, AT THE VERY TIP TOP OF THE CONSTITUTION IN ARTICLE I?  See above car bombing attempt to get full impact of why the inventor will need such help against forces that would try to rip from them the inventions.

 This is why protection of the inventor rests with Congress to change whatever laws to protect those rights, yet what happens when the law and system of protections actually work against the inventor, read on...

WONDER WHY INVENTION IS THE ONLY PRIVATE SECTOR JOB DESERVING SUCH SPECIAL AND TOTAL PROTECTION WITH THE FULL WEIGHT OF THE CONSTITUTION BEHIND IT?

  Because without inventors who yield royalties for their inventions for themselves, you have nothing but Communism or a Dictatorship, systems that have failed due perhaps to lack of invention.  So if the Constitution fails Iviewit, the inventors and shareholders here, the Patent office and the Judicial will have also failed due to self interested parties manning those posts not on behalf of the People but on behalf of lining their pockets at the determinant of Democracy.  Public officers who will have violated their sworn oaths to G0d to uphold the Constitution, their oaths to the People to serve and protect and if we do not stop it, well then we are the first to invent in the Decider's Nazi Kingdom.

You will be next though if you sit by complacently without doing what the Constitution mandates us to do, which is to find and wipe out corruption in the government, in fact, it allows you take arms against it if necessary.  This is frightening as it will rest on the children of the next generation to do regain their freedoms.  Your personal property will be next to be seized and by a government run by a corrupt few, so read on to find out how to prevent this from continuing, your child may be the next great inventor.

So without protections, inventors will begin to go elsewhere, to more friendly countries than the US, where patent attorneys are not rumored to being stealing and converting their client inventions and where the system of jurisprudence has not corrupted so much so, as to give the impression that it is aiding and abetting the crimes through denials of due process and granting false inventors others ideas.

With just one inventor who flees to say China with the hottest new and novel revolutionary idea, China will have the patent and the royalty streams and we will pay dearly for our loss both to the Chinese for the license we will pay them and for the loss of an inventor. 

A personal note from inventor Eliot Bernstein ~ Personally, I believe I will die soon, refer to car bombing and death threats above and the fact that there are no protections in place to prevent such as you will learn by reading through the documents.  Yet I am content dying as many before me, defending for my children the values I hold dear in the old Constitution and fighting the new King Bush version.

The Constitution must prevail, no matter the forces attempting to destroy it for personal gain, no matter their perceived strength, no matter their size, no matter how many, or all is lost in America.

We must win or die trying, so that we may teach our kids about democracy, not about false wars for profits and concentration camps we set up to violate human rights, not about cities like New Orleans where we must now live with shame, not about dead Iraqi children who were killed through aggression for no reason, otherwise you will be teaching your children escape routes to the nightmare we have allowed this country to become.

The following information that inventors may die delivering to you (one already missing), to protect you and yours, if you can follow all of this, will evidence that to save Democracy and our Country, the crimes herein, sooner or later must be tried, the crime treason.

The inventions must be returned to their rightful owners, those that committed the crimes and the riff raff that violated public offices to aid and abet the criminals in robbing the United States Patent Office and other treasonous acts against the People must be put to death for treason, nothing short will allow this country to regain its rights.  Nothing short will set the example to the children that treason is not a wise endeavor.

Bank robberies, stock scandals (Enron, Arthur Andersen, Worldcomm, etc., read on to find out how these are related to Iviewit) all counted together, are infinitely smaller crimes in comparison to how much can be stolen if the Patent Office and Commerce Department are robbed.  Even one patent, as the case is here can be worth a trillion dollars, you can put that on your sticky pad (another invention worth a fortune.

Figuring out how to rip-off the patent office is the crime of the century that must be stopped dead in its tracks.  This crime against our nations treasure chest of invention is the crown jewel of the nation, the steam engine of free commerce.  This is the reason protecting invention is at the top of Congress' list of to-do's to protect free commerce, that is why Congress must now take action in these matters.  Inaction points now only to the guilty holding off due process showing you the People that this country is under siege and giving you a pretty good fingerprint of the Corrupters/Deciders, who now rule in delusions of grandeur.  We shall see how the Judiciary Committees, Feinstein, the FBI, the USPTO, the USPTO-OED, the DOJ-OIG and all those charged with protecting inventors rights act, will they continue to protect the clown at the top, pointing to eventual Patentgate or will they do what their oaths to the People demand?

Without American invention and the gazillions of dollars it brings to the country for things like:

Lining the inventors' pockets with royalties, as it is the highest paying job in the world if you invent a winner that changes the world.  Think inventions that have changed the world.  Think Edison, now that rings a bell, or a Bell, without those two inventors think where the world would be today, a darker world with the US mail being the fastest transmitter of news,

Creating the only legal right to monopolize, spurring everyone to try and creat something that changes the world, as invention is the basis of almost every product created, manufactured and sold worldwide.

Without invention our country and democracy would have stagnated to death like all other forms of government before it, where the people have no motivation to invent, where invention only made the King/Decider and a few wealthier.  Inventors flee dictatorships or just plain stop inventing for lack of reward, imagine in those other governments what happens when the King/Decider likes your inventions but does not like you.  This is why Russia and Communism stagnate at some point, the People have no real incentive to invent, in fact, it becomes a deadly job the better your invention is, as once it is given to the King, it may be off with your head, as the King then claims your invention as his own.

Invention employ's almost 90% of the workforce worldwide, in building the future for our children, it is the lead source to technologies which benefit the world.  A future in America where invention is gone will set us back technologically, as it was invention that put us in the lead as the greatest nation in the world, the most technologically advanced, etc.

Anywhere on the planet, from any person, of any size, any age, any creed or color, wherever and whomever invents a concept can change the world, in profound and beautiful ways, as the Iviewit inventions have already changed yours, without this the world will also stagnate, as we will become dependent on our leaders to invent, our Decider will be the only one who will invent as People will have no incentive, and George Bush and Dick Cheney can only invent false wars and things like that, they are two most moronic leaders ever.  This is how our country will start to make money, by stealing from the People and war mongering for oil profiteering, how inventive, how productive to the nation, what a future for our children this will provide.

"To the Victor goes the Spoils" will soon be replaced with "To the Corrupt and Greedy goes the Spoils".  Will our children be forced to arms against a corrupt government that has begun to manipulate inventions (how not inventive), violate the Constitution, violate war codes of ethics and treatise, legal ethics, etc.  Looks that way for now.

People, refuse to accept this for our country, demand Justice be restored to the Justice Department, demand accountability from your leaders, they are not your Deciders, they are just public servants.  These leaders are Demagogues, not people who earned their power, they are not the leaders you want to follow, unless you want to be part of genocide and human torture and all the new ideas of our leaders.  Following our leaders without holding them accountable to the People for their actions, is certain to lead us into hell for our children.  This Administration now stands above the law, above Congress (if they are not part of the problem), stands above law, above the People and that leaves the People serving the pleasure of the President, claiming in the end "I was only following orders."  Where the people in charge of government now "serve the pleasure of the President", not the People, we as a nation are in grave danger, the same dangers German's were subjected to when they allowed their leader to run amuck unchecked and blindly submitted to his pleasure, look where that got them.  The German's who were not directly involved in the Nazi regime are still historically tarnished for their complacency, not for their direct involvement, the shame and embarrassment worldwide still lingering on their nation, fairly or unfairly, had they raised objection and fought their leaders, they would have been looked on as hero's.  How will Americans be viewed in history after this Decider and his regime.

Die now for the principals of true democracy, so as to show the children what to do as corruption rears its evil head, so as to show your children what to do in the face of a corrupt government.  The inventors at Iviewit have stood in the face of the machine to expose the crimes against the United States, to set example to the children that Spartans still exist.  A small group destined to stand for what is right, despite the system that is supposed to stand alongside them, seemingly acting against them.  Ask where is the Justice Department and the Legal community to protect not the inventors but the United States.  These crimes where committed against the United States, in fact, Iviewit was directed by Harry Moatz, Director of the Office of Enrollment and Discipline at the Patent Office, upon discovery of fraud in the patent applications possibly, to draft a request to the Commissioner of Patents requesting suspension of the patent applications based on claims of Fraud on the United States Patent and Trademark Office, that filing was answered with patent suspensions pending investigation!!!!

May you wonder what the hell this long diatribe is doing on a worldwide corporate web and not a far left blog, read on, touch the evidence, feel free to call on the witnesses.  If you find after this exercise that the evidence reveals the alleged crimes are true, after digging deep to the center facts, not being dissuaded  by their attempts to make it to complex for the common man or burying you in paperwork, if upon reaching the conclusion that it is all true, that the real inventors are not the lawyers who committed these treasonous crimes, well then let it frighten you to take action, not feeling hopeless like you can't fight city hall, get your pitchforks.  If true, than these events will reveal not only who the true and proper inventors are but will provide you with a clear path to understanding how and why the government was then seized by this same group of people and how the fox got in the henhouse and why our country has gone to hell since.  You will understand why elections were gained through fraud and usurping the Constitution to select a leader not chosen by the People but chosen for them by Supreme Court Justices who also think they are above the law, not merely public servants and you will see that our leaders where placed in power to stave off due process and procedure against the attorneys who stand to lose everything, including their lives if treason is the crime that they are charged with in the end, the crime they committed. 

We the People must be frightened by this story to rid our system of the few corrupt souls for the sanctity of the Nation.  We must fight the true terror and terrorists fighting Democracy, for I do not think Bin Laden or Hussein where capable of forcing the American people to surrender their rights to freedom, though through propaganda and manipulation of the media, Americans like sheep did.  Fallen asleep where the People, trusting government inapposite of the Constitution's mandate to keep it check and balance through inherent distrust to keep them honest.  Fear of being called unpatriotic making you surrender your rights, why just look how your leaders in Congress rolled over to the leader and surrender your rights for you, fearful of being deemed unpatriotic.  You need only look to those promoting these terms as basis for their actions to find the true terrorists of democracy.  Guys like little dicked Bin Laden who attack women and children to make a point, well, look at Israel, even the Israeli's have not surrendered a single freedom in fear of him or Hussein. hmmmmmm

Meet the real terrorists of the Nation, criminals disguised as politicians (Bush and Cheney) belonging to secret Nazi cults with hidden agendas against the People, criminals manipulating elections, war profiteering off our children soldiers, oil profiteering through wars based on falsified documents and information (since Texas wells dried up and these idiots cannot get a day job to pay their way), rapping the People through stock scams, rapping the legal system to benefit and shield them in crime, trying to rewrite law and the Constitution to protect their criminals actions, robbing the Patent Office, stealing personal property from the People, this is how our spoiled rotten kids ruining the government operate, of course since they are spoiled and come from wealth they feel entitled to call themselves elite, when really they have never earned a thing.  Sounds far fetched but just open your eyes, discount the tainted media that hides things like the war crimes and deaths of our boys in Iraq and Afghanistan,  as the media is now the left arm of corruption, not the right arm of anarchy, sedating you and taking your eye off reality.  These Terrorists could destroy the very fabric of our Constitution and remove your freedoms, desecrate the values of our Nation that many have died to give you, thereby destroying the future of the children, unless of course your name is Bush, Cheney, etc. one of the elitist few.  This is where we now stand America, the fox is in the henhouse, the Iviewit story can only help you see how, why and who it was overtaken by, from there the rest will depend on you the People, as it seems that much of the government has corrupted in unison and others fear changing it, for fear of shotguns to the face or guys in trench coats showing up at the Intensive Care Unit you are recovering at with papers to sign and large bulges in their trench coats.

Perhaps the inventor is protected expressly under the Constitution for the reason that our Founding Fathers reasoned that the greatest forces in the world work to try and steal and convert the invention as their own and that since the loss to the inventor, even one, would be the greatest threat to the value of their creation, they put the entire weight of the Constitution and Congress behind even the lowliest of inventors.  Knowing if the inventor in all his smallness lost to the larger forces, the principles of Democracy would be destroyed and the King/Decider we Americans died to break free from, again would rule and the People would no longer be free. 

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No matter what Media player you use on the Internet to view that video, it uses the Iviewit processes. Without the processes Internet video was garbage, Bill Gates would have given up on media and gave his media player to Glazer to go start Real Player, wait, he did, until he learned of the the Iviewit inventions and since then he has had over 10 revisions of Media player, all the while trying to wipe Real Player off the map with anticompetitive practices.  No matter the television station your are viewing and how high the definition, the video was created and distributed using the scaling processes invented by the Iviewit inventors. 

Bet Ellen had no idea at the time how profound her statement would be and how much of the country is really at stake over it.

Ellen DeGeneres Speaks Out on Iviewit Technology - "Use Iviewit for the Sake of the Country"

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Fascist Plot to Overthrow the United States by the likes of Bush's grandpa Prescott and the plot to overthrow Roosevelt.

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The Dark Heart Of Fascism In The United States

The Whitehouse Coup

BBC Audio Documentary

Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by right-wing American

The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.

Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.

1933 Attempted Coup on Franklin Roosevelt

Click Here for Full Story

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After listening to that, look at the next article to see how Proskauer Rose and Joseph Proskauer (Nazi disguised as Jew) were part of the plot.  We learn here how these New World Order / Skull & Boneheads really operate.  They are not beholden to anything higher than these secret cult clubs they bond with in gay ways (no offense to homosexuals meant).  Therefore, one may ask how could a Jew be called a Nazi, it is because Jew is second to the NWO / SB values.  They infiltrate all religions, all political parties and virtually all social outlets, looking and appearing as one of you, with a secret plan though.  They intend to destroy that which you belong, whether Jew, Hispanic, White, Black, Democrat, Republican, Catholic, Christian, they want to incite you to hate each other, it feeds their goal.  Just look around, this is what plagues America.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4-TL5AGHFY

/HTTP://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJBxdRIQx7Y  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbnpN07J_zg 

Waterboarding - We should stand proud behind our country and its leaders who believe in this.  I have never prouder to be an American.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=-GcXl1y_mQw 

July 30, 2007 Jerusalem Post - Joseph Proskauer Aids Nazi cause, lets Jews die in concentration camps, hiding knowledge that camps existed.

www.coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/proskauer.html

or this one

Non Zionist and Zionist in America

or this one

Joseph Proskauer named stooge in plot to kill FDR

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July 11, 2005

Julian Bond continues his persona vendetta against conservatives

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond opened the NAACP's national convention in Milwaukee as he has other such gatherings in the past -- by attacking George W. Bush and other conservatives.

The NAACP's national confab got underway yesterday in Milwaukee. Bond took the opportunity to take swipes at Bush and others, of course, reserving special venom for black conservatives.

Bond opened with an attack, saying, "Milwaukee is the home of beer, of brats and the Bradley Foundation," and blasting Bush for failing to appear at the NAACP's annual convention for the fifth straight year.

Bond explained his reference to the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation later in the speech, saying it is among entities that fund what he called "fraudulent" civil rights organizations.

He charged that the organizations appear to back civil rights but push school vouchers, use legal means to assault affirmative action and try to redraw political boundaries in hopes of preventing people of color from being elected to office.

Such organizations have had black "hucksters" on their payrolls for 20 years, said Bond to thunderous applause.

"Like ventriloquist dummies, they speak in their puppet master's voice, but we can see his lips moving," he said.

Similarly, Bond fired at organizations that have tried to "seduce black clergy" to conservative causes and criticized what he said is an attempt by the Bush administration to replace vital public welfare programs with faith-based organizations.

He gave special importance to the continuing battle over Bush's judicial nominees, especially a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, saying the high court needs another independent-minded justice like her. Too many Bush nominees to federal judgeships have made rulings that hurt the civil rights movement, he said, calling newly named federal appeals court judge Janice Rogers Brown "the female Clarence Thomas."

The former Democratic Georgia state senator blasted the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate for failing to hold a roll call vote on a resolution apologizing for failing to enact an anti-lynching law first proposed 105 years ago. He named eight Republican senators who did not co-sponsor the resolution, saying, "If a United States senator in 2005 cannot apologize for that, what outrage is deserving of an apology?"

Targeting the Bush administration, Bond said it was "outsourcing torture" by sending terrorism suspects to foreign lands and backing economic policies that have created "an ownership society, where you're really on your own."

"They profess to being true believers, but they're really true deceivers," he said.

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Grebe Nazi Links

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Grebe 1

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Grebe 2

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Grebe 3

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Grebe 4

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Grebe Backs Bush and Bush Nazi Links

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Here's where and who Mike has been hanging out with lately to turn America into garbage after ruining Foley and Lardner, then the RNC and now Charity @ The Bradley Foundation of right wing gone to Heart of Darkness

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation - Michael Grebe

One of the country's largest and most influential right-wing foundations, the Bradley Foundation is known for its clearly articulated political and ideological vision. In addition to providing funding for a host of right-wing organizations, Bradley contributes to conservative and often highly controversial scholarship, publications and "academic" research aimed at legitimizing far-right policy positions.

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
PO Box 510860
Milwaukee, WI 53203-0153
Website: www.bradleyfdn.org

Established: 1942
President/CEO: Michael W. Grebe
Board of Directors: Thomas L. Rhodes (Chairman), Reed Coleman (Vice-Chairman), Michael Grebe, William L. Armstrong, and more.
Finances: $665,329,753 (2004) assets
Grants awarded, annually: $33,332,537 (2004) grants awarded
Employees: 20
Publications: The Lion Letter, annual reports outlining contributions and donations
Formerly known as: Allen-Bradley Foundation
Prize Recipients 2005: George F. Will (syndicated columnist), Ward Connerly (anti-affirmative action, founder of American Civil Rights Institute), Heather McDonald (Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute), and Robert P. George (professor, former presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights).

Principal Issues

·         The Bradley Foundation is one of the largest philanthropic foundations responsible for the financial backing of the right-wing agenda for nearly twenty years.
 

·         Bradley’s philanthropy supports right-wing organizations, privatized educational programs, as well as many non-partisan social programs and civic organizations.
 

·         Issues Bradley supports include: private school vouchers, faith-based social services, and welfare reform.
 

·         According to Bradley, the projects sponsored by the foundation “encourage improved government, a more vital sense of citizenship, and a strong belief in personal responsibility.”
 

·         Bradley has been accused of underreporting the grant amounts that it gives to many of the right-wing organizations that it supports.

Activities

Bradley has made right-wing inroads in academia by establishing chairmanship positions, undergraduate and graduate programs, fellowships, and whole departments at many prestigious universities including: Boston College, Boston University, Bowling Green State University, Carnegie Mellon University, Catholic University, Columbia University, Georgetown University, George Mason University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Kenyon College, Marquette University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, New York University, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California- Berkeley, University of California- Los Angeles, University of California- San Diego, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, and Washington University- St. Louis.

Bradley has supported and in some cases, had to defend controversial right-wing recipients of their grants, particularly Charles Murray and Dinesh D’Souza.

Charles Murray - Murray, author of “The Bell Curve,” which argues that intelligence is predicated on race, and “Losing Ground,” whose thesis is that social programs should be abolished. Murray’s work was so controversial and objectionable that the right-wing Manhattan Institute, supported by Bradley and for which he worked, asked him to leave. However, the Bradley Foundation stood by him because Murray, according to former Bradley President Michael Joyce, “is one of the foremost social thinkers in the country.” Bradley extended Murray’s $100,000 per year grant when he went to the American Enterprise Institute.
Dinesh D’Souza - D’Souza, in his book, “The End of Racism,” attempts to absolve Whites from discrimination against Blacks during slavery, claiming that Blacks were too uncivilized to be a part of society anyway.

List of Right-Wing Grantees

Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty
Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
American Civil Rights Institute
American Civil Rights Union
American Conservative Union Foundation
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Becket Fund
Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO)
Research Center
Center for Individual Rights
Center for Education Reform
Center for Public Justice
Center for the Study of Popular Culture
Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation America
Citizens for the Preservation of Constitutional Rights
Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy
Collegiate Network
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Foundation for Policy Research
Evergreen Freedom Foundation
Equal Opportunity Foundation
Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Fellowship of Christian Athletes
Friends of Choice in Urban Schools
Free Congress Research and Education Foundation
Galen Institute
Heartland Institute
Heritage Foundation
Hudson Institute
Hoover Institute
Institute for American Values
Institute for Justice
Leadership Institute
Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
National Association of Scholars
National Center for Policy Analysis
Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy
Thomas B. Fordham Institute

 President Bush on the Bradley Foundation

“The reason that I am so happy that my friend Mike Grebe is here and Mike Joyce and others from The Bradley Foundation is because "Foundation America" must be a part of the revitalization of our communities as well. And The Bradley Foundation has always been willing to see different solutions. They have been willing to challenge the status quo. They say where we find failure, something else must occur. And the Foundation not only has been kind and generous with its donations, the Foundation also has been willing to help people think anew, and I appreciate you all coming. I am honored you're here and thanks for your good work.”
– President George W. Bush, speaking at the Bradley Foundation-supported Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God in Christ, Milwaukee, July 2002.

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Bradley Foundation Under Reports Grants and to whom

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Now understanding that Bradley funds Yale for his Federalist ideology to brainwash young greed centered children who probably would not have got into Yale without substantial daddy donations, we see a link as to how two organizations steeped in separate plots against the United States came together into one New World Order plot run by spoiled kids and their parents who spoil them wanting to create wealth of kings by hording it all and screwing the middle and poor classes. 

What is frightening is that they have taken advantage of American's who are used to saying your such a conspiracy theorist, no plot could be in play by the rich people who are so nice to the poor.   I think the next You Tube debate question should be:

As candidate for the next President to take oath of office to and for the People,

1.please announce any/all allegiances or oaths to any other organization that you have sworn public or private oath to, including any Federalist organizations, secret organizations such as Skull and Bones, fraternal organizations, etc.

2.who are your ten largest political campaign contributors and briefly describe the special interests behind them?

3.if you were President would you endorse legislation that would make it a crime tried by treason for any public employee who falsifies information or fails to disclose membership to any group that has dissimilar interests to the People and upholding the Constitutional sworn too?

4. if you were President how would you have handled the Libby situation which is a stain on American Justice and the Presidency?

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How much does this next piece sound like Nazi Germany, with 9/11 leading to Patriot Act, leading to humanitarian rights violations and the removal of Habeus Corpus as similar, almost step by step, to the Nazi master plan.

Edited from Wikipedia (listed as a skull member on politicalfriendster.com) from the entry on Adolph Hitler and his rise to power).  We cannot let history repeat itself.

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

US author, diplomat, inventor, physicist, politician, & printer (1706 - 1790)

Having become Chancellor, Hitler [Bush Grebe Cheney] foiled all attempts to gain a majority in parliament and on that basis [committed election fraud] persuaded President Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag again. Elections were scheduled for early March, but on 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building was set on fire.^[26] [9/11 Twin Towers, although there were three, the Pentagon, etc.] Since a Dutch independent communist was found in the building, [not sure any bodies were ever found of the supposed terrorists, rumble was quickly removed for new building that is, need some spin there] the fire was blamed on a Communist plot ["Terrorist" Plot by deck of cards terrorists (52 thugs mainly funded by Bush's father, Hussein & Bin Laden, America so scared of these 52 guys that we sold our freedoms to the bs propaganda spun @ cnn, fox and payollastream media] to which the government reacted with the Reichstag Fire Decree [Patriot Act] of 28 February which suspended basic rights, including habeas corpus [that came later in this plot but the Patriot removed all the other important ones first]. Under the provisions of this decree, the German Communist Party and other groups were suppressed [Democrats & Republicans alike], and communist functionaries and deputies were arrested [shot gunned in the face, the AG/SS at your bedside, threats to Supreme Court justices, concentration camp Gitmoschwitz set up for dissenters] put to flight, or murdered.

Campaigning continued, with the Nazis making use of paramilitary violence [immediately after 9/11 attacking a country that had nothing to do with terrorists, only Saddam who factually hated and killed terrorists, gotta give these guys credit for spinning AL QAEDA into Iraq or 9/11 based on forged and false propaganda], anti-Communist hysteria [anti Muslim, Chinese Poisoning the Chinese Food, Mexican's as humans capable only of jobs Hitler's boys won't do and anti-American dissenters who do not go along with Decider decisions], and the government's resources for propaganda [CNN, FOX, etc] On election day, 6 March, the NSDAP increased its result to 43.9% of the vote, remaining the largest party, but its victory was marred by its failure to secure an absolute majority, necessitating maintaining a coalition with the DNVP.^[27]

Removal of remaining limits

With this combination of legislative and executive power, Hitler's government further suppressed the remaining political opposition. The KPD and the SPD were banned, while all other political parties dissolved themselves. Labour unions were merged with employers' federations into an organisation under Nazi control, and the autonomy of German state governments was abolished.

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Keith Olbermann on Skull and Bones - Bush and Kerry

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A Primer on the New World Order

Endgame: Elite's Blueprint For Global Enslavement 1 of 4

Part 2

Endgame: Elite's Blueprint For Global Enslavement 2 of 4

http://skullandbones.multiply.com/journal/item/4/ENDGAME

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OK, that said, this next link will scare the shit out of you

May 25, 2007 C-Span Washington Journal Bush Signs Law Giving Him Unlimited Powers in Emergency over State Federal Tribal Local Government - Similar to Hitler Grab for Power

Now Listen to Wesley Clark on Bill Maher and his Analysis.  This is a decorated Four Star General with a brain, not a draft dodging Bush or Cheney.

and more from Wesley on Iran

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Reuters Photo Wire Picks Up Bush
Nazi Salute June 15, 2005, the similarities are visual.  Hitler had charisma and public appeal, Bush does not even maintain those qualities, making him more pathetic than hero.

Hitler also used the SA paramilitary to push Hugenberg into resigning [Cheney sends Gonzales to Ashcroft Bedside] and proceeded to politically isolate Vice Chancellor Papen. Because the SA's demands for political and military power caused much anxiety among military leaders [Comey, Generals, Ex-General], Hitler used allegations of a plot by the SA leader Ernst Röhm to purge the SA's leadership during the Night of the Long Knives. Opponents unconnected with the SA were also murdered, notably Gregor Strasser and former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher

President Paul von Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934. Rather than holding new presidential elections, Hitler's cabinet passed a law proclaiming the presidency dormant and transferred the role and powers of the head of state to Hitler as Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor).[29] Thereby Hitler also became supreme commander of the military, whose officers then swore an oath not to the state or the constitution but to Hitler personally [hmmm, that sounds like Gonzales and others who work "for the pleasure of the President - Yavolt]. [29] In a mid-August plebiscite, these acts found the approval of 84.6%[30] of the electorate. Combining the highest offices in state, military and party in his hand, Hitler had attained supreme rule that could no longer be legally challenged!

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After watching this picture transform, click on it to see what it means

http://www.hermes-press.com/nazification_step4.htm

!!!!!OH MY G0D, THIS NEXT LINK STATES THAT GEORGE W. BUSH I & II WERE BOTH MEMBERS OF THE SAME CULT AS ADOLPH HITLER!!!!!  WOULD YOU HAVE VOTED FOR HIM IF YOU KNEW? BUSH MEMBER OF SAME CULT AS ADOLPH HITLER!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4kTnP5VJ1k

Extract from America Betrayed, Bush, bin Laden, 9-11. by R. Joseph, Ph.D. University Press, ISBN: 0971644578 http://universitypress.info/AmericaBetrayed11.html Prescot Bush and Rockefeller's Standard Oil had been in business with the Hitler regime and the Nazis since 1933, and in 1942, three Bush businesses were seized by the U.S. government, for violation of the Trading With the Enemies Act.   IT ALL BEGINS AT YALE: SKULL & BONES

George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin
http://www.kmf.org/williams/bushbook/bush_book.txt

CHAPTER 2

THE HITLER PROJECT

Bush Property Seized -- Trading with the Enemy

In October 1942, ten months after entering World War II, America was preparing its first assault against Nazi military forces. Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. His 18-year-old son George,
the future U.S. President, had just begun training to become a naval pilot.

On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City which were being conducted by Prescott Bush.

Under the "Trading with the Enemy Act", the government took over the "Union Banking Corporation," in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland "Bunny" Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush. Note #1

The order seizing the bank "vest[ed] [seized] all of the capital stock of Union Banking Corporation, a New York corporation," and named the holders of its shares as:

 See #b|"E. Roland Harriman -- 3991 shares." Harriman was chairman and director of Union Banking Corp. (UBC); this is "Bunny" Harriman, described by Prescott Bush as a place holder who didn't get much into banking affairs; Prescott managed his personal investments.

 See #b|"Cornelis Lievense -- 4 shares." Lievense was president and director of UBC, and a New York resident banking functionary for the Nazis.

 See #b|"Harold D. Pennington -- 1 share." Pennington was treasurer and director of UBC, and an office manager employed by Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman.

 See #b|"Ray Morris -- 1 share." Morris was director of UBC, and a partner of Bush and the Harrimans.

 See #b|"Prescott S. Bush -- 1 share." Bush was director of UBC, which was co-founded and sponsored by his father-in-law George Walker; he was senior managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and Averell Harriman.

 See #b|"H.J. Kouwenhoven -- 1 share" Kouwenhoven was director of UBC; he organized UBC as the emissary of Fritz Thyssen in negotiations with George Walker and Averell Harriman; he was also managing director of UBC's Netherlands affiliate under Nazi occupation; industrial executive in Nazi Germany, and also director and chief foreign financial executive of the German Steel Trust.

 See #b|"Johann G. Groeninger -- 1 share." Groeninger was director of UBC and of its Netherlands affiliate; he was an industrial executive in Nazi Germany.

The order also specified: "all of which shares are held for the benefit of ... members of the Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals ... of a designated enemy country...."

By October 26, 1942, U.S. troops were underway for North Africa. On October 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the "Holland-American Trading Corporation" and the "Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation." Note #2

U.S. forces landed under fire near Algiers on November 8, 1942; heavy combat raged throughout November. Nazi interests in the "Silesian-American Corporation," long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on November 17, 1942. In this action, the government announced that it was seizing only the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis' U.S. partners to carry on the business. Note #3

These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in wartime were tragically, too little and too late. President Bush's family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover
of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their
well-known results.

The facts presented here must be known, and their implications reflected upon, for a proper understanding of President George Herbert Walker Bush and of the danger to mankind that he represents. The President's family
fortune was largely a result of the Hitler project. The powerful Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him into the Central Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father's
partners in the Hitler project.

President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news, Note #4 explained nothing about the
Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the "Thyssen family" of "Germany and/or Hungary" -- "nationals ... of a designated enemy country."

By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corp. were legally "front men for the Nazis", the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way "were Hitler's Nazis
themselves hired, armed, and instructed by" the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? Let us examine the Harriman-Bush Hitler project from the 1920s until it was partially broken up, to seek an answer for that question.

2. Origin and Extent of the Project

Fritz Thyssen and his business partners are universally recognized as the most important German financiers of Adolf Hitler's takeover of Germany. At the time of the order seizing the Thyssen family's Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen had already published his famous book, "I Paid Hitler",

Note
#5 admitting that he had financed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement since October 1923. Thyssen's role as the leading early backer of Hitler's grab for power in Germany had been noted by U.S. diplomats in Berlin in 1932.
 

Note #6 The order seizing the Bush-Thyssen bank was curiously quiet and modest about the identity of the perpetrators who had been nailed.

But two weeks before the official order, government investigators had reported secretly that "W. Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist." Harriman and Thyssen agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York. "[C]ertain of [Harriman's] associates would serve as directors...." Thyssen agent "H.J. Kouwenhoven ... came to the United
States ... prior to 1924 for conferences with the Harriman Company in this connection...."

Note #7

When exactly was "Harriman in Europe sometime prior to 1924"? In fact, he was in Berlin in 1922 to set up the Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. under George Walker's presidency.

The Union Banking Corporation was established formally in 1924, as a unit in the Manhattan offices of W.A. Harriman & Co., interlocking with the  Thyssen-owned "Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart" (BHS) in the Netherlands.

The investigators concluded that "the Union Banking Corporation has since its inception handled funds chiefly supplied to it through the Dutch bank by the Thyssen interests for American investment."

Thus by personal agreement between Averell Harriman and Fritz Thyssen in 1922, W.A. Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking Corporation) would be transferring funds back and forth between New York and the "Thyssen interests" in Germany. By putting up about $400,000, the Harriman organization would be joint owner and manager of Thyssen's banking operations outside of Germany.

"How important was the Nazi enterprise for which President Bush's father was the New York banker?"

The 1942 U.S. government investigative report said that Bush's Nazi-front bank was an interlocking concern with the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works Corporation or "German Steel Trust") led by Fritz Thyssen and his two brothers. After the war, congressional investigators probed the Thyssen interests, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units. The investigation showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the
following approximate proportions of total German national output: "50.8% of Nazi Germany's pig iron; 41.4% of Nazi Germany's universal plate; 36.0% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate; 38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet;

45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes; 22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire;

35.0% of Nazi Germany's explosives." Note #8

This accounts for many, many Nazi submarines, bombs, rifles, gas chambers, etc.

Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in 1926. That same year, a friend of Harriman and Bush set up a giant new organization for their client Fritz Thyssen, prime sponsor of politician Adolf Hitler.
The new "German Steel Trust," Germany's largest industrial corporation, was organized in 1926 by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon. Dillon was the old comrade of Prescott Bush's father Sam Bush from the "Merchants of Death" bureau in World War I.

In return for putting up $70 million to create his organization, majority owner Thyssen gave the Dillon Read company two or more representatives on the board of the new Steel Trust. Note #9

Thus there is a division of labor: Thyssen's own confidential accounts, for political and related purposes, were run through the Walker-Bush organization; the Steel Trust did its corporate banking through Dillon
Read.
- * * * -

The Walker-Bush firm's banking activities were not just politically neutral money-making ventures which happened to coincide with the aims of German Nazis. All of the firm's European business in those days was organized around anti-democratic political forces.

In 1927, criticism of their support for totalitarianism drew this retort from Bert Walker, written from Kennebunkport to Averell Harriman: "It seems to me that the suggestion in connection with Lord Bearsted's views that we withdraw from Russia smacks somewhat of the impertinent.... I think that we have drawn our line and should hew to it." Note #1 Note #0

Averell Harriman met with Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. A representative of the firm subsequently telegraphed good news back to his chief executive Bert Walker: "... During these last days ... Mussolini ...
has examined and approved our c[o]ntract 15 June." Note #1 Note #1

The great financial collapse of 1929-31 shook America, Germany, and Britain, weakening all governments. It also made the hard-pressed Prescott Bush even more willing to do whatever was necessary to retain his new place in the world. It was in this crisis that certain Anglo-Americans determined on the installation of a Hitler regime in Germany.

W.A. Harriman & Co., well-positioned for this enterprise and rich in assets from their German and Russian business, merged with the British-American investment house, Brown Brothers, on January 1, 1931. Bert Walker retired to his own G.H. Walker & Co. This left the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush, and Thatcher M. Brown as the senior partners of the new Brown Brothers Harriman firm. (The London, England branch of the Brown family firm continued operating under its historic name -- Brown, Shipley.)

Robert A. Lovett also came over as a partner from Brown Brothers. His father, E.H. Harriman's lawyer and railroad chief, had been on the War Industries Board with Prescott's father. Though he remained a partner in
Brown Brothers Harriman, the junior Lovett soon replaced his father as chief exexcutive of Union Pacific Railroad.

Brown Brothers had a racial tradition that fitted it well for the Hitler project. American patriots had cursed its name back in Civil War days.  Brown Brothers, with offices in the U.S.A. and in Engla nd, had carried on
their ships fully 75 percent of the slave cotton from the American South over to British mill owners; through their usurious credit they controlled and manipulated the slave-owners.

Now, in 1931, the virtual dictator of world finance, Bank of England Governor Montagu Collet Norman, was a former Brown Brothers partner, whose grandfather had been boss of Brown Brothers during the U.S. Civil War. Montagu Norman was known as the most avid of Hitler's supporters within British ruling circles, and Norman's intimacy with this firm was essential to his management of the Hitler project.

In 1931, while Prescott Bush ran the New York office of Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott's partner was Montagu Norman's intimate friend Thatcher Brown. The Bank of England chief always stayed at the home of Prescott's partner on his hush-hush trips to New York. Prescott Bush concentrated on the firm's German actitivites, and Thatcher Brown saw to their business in old England, under the guidance of his mentor Montagu Norman. Note #1 Note #2

3. Hitler's Ladder to Power

Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany January 30, 1933, and absolute dictator in March 1933, after two years of expensive and violent lobbying and electioneering. Two affiliates of the Bush-Harriman organization played great parts in this criminal undertaking: Thyssen's German Steel Trust; and the Hamburg-Amerika Line and several of its executives. Note #1 Note #3

Let us look more closely at the Bush family's German partners.

"Fritz Thyssen" told Allied interrogators after the war about some of his financial support for the Nazi Party: "In 1930 or 1931 ... I told [Hitler's deputy Rudolph] Hess ... I would arrange a credit for him with a Dutch bank
in Rotterdam, the Bank fussaur Handel und Schiff [i.e. Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS), the Harriman-Bush affiliate]. I arranged the credit ... he would pay it back in three years.... I chose a Dutch bank because I did not want to be mixed up with German banks in my position, and because I thought it was better to do business with a Dutch bank, and I thought I would have the Nazis a little more in my hands....

"The credit was about 250-300,000 [gold] marks -- about the sum I had given before. The loan has been repaid in part to the Dutch bank, but I think some money is still owing on it...." Note #1 Note #4

The overall total of Thyssen's political donations and loans to the Nazis was well over a million dollars, including funds he raised from others -- in a period of terrible money-shortage in Germany.

"Friedrich Flick" was the major co-owner of the German Steel Trust with Fritz Thyssen, Thyssen's longtime collaborator and sometime competitor. In preparation for the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the U.S. government said that Flick was "one of leading financiers and industrialists who from 1932 contributed large sums to the Nazi Party ... member of 'Circle of Friends' of Himmler who contributed large sums to the SS." Note #1 Note #5

Flick, like Thyssen, financed the Nazis to maintain their private armies called Schutzstaffel (S.S. or Black Shirts) and Sturmabteilung (S.A., storm troops or Brown Shirts).

The Flick-Harriman partnership was directly supervised by Prescott Bush, President Bush's father, and by George Walker, President Bush's grandfather.

The Harriman-Walker Union Banking Corp. arrangements for the German Steel Trust had made them bankers for Flick and his vast operations in Germany by no later than 1926.

The "Harriman Fifteen Corporation" (George Walker, president, Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman, sole directors) held a substantial stake in the Silesian Holding Co. at the time of the merger with Brown Brothers, January 1, 1931. This holding correlated to Averell Harriman's chairmanship of the "Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation," the American group owning one-third of a complex of steelmaking, coal-mining and zinc-mining
activities in Germany and Poland, in which Friedrich Flick owned two-thirds.
Note #1 Note #6

The Nuremberg prosecutor characterized Flick as follows:

"Proprietor and head of a large group of industrial enterprises (coal and iron mines, steel producing and fabricating plants) ... 'Wehrwirtschaftsfuehrer,' 1938 [title awarded to prominent industrialists for merit in armaments drive -- 'Military Economy Leader']...." Note #1 Note #7

For this buildup of the Hitler war machine with coal, steel, and arms production, using slave laborers, the Nazi Flick was condemned to seven years in prison at the Nuremberg trials; he served three years. With
friends in New York and London, however, Flick lived into the 1970s and died a billionaire.

On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush -- then director of the German Steel Trust's Union Banking Corporation -- initiated an alert to the absent Averell Harriman about a problem which had developed in the Flick partnership. Note #1 Note #8 Bush sent Harriman a clipping from the "New York Times" of that day, which reported that the Polish government was fighting back against American and German stockholders who controlled "Poland's largest industrial unit, the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company...."

The "Times" article continued: "The company has long been accused of mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities. Warrants were issued in December for several directors accused of tax evasions. They were German citizens and they fled. They were replaced by Poles. Herr Flick, regarding this as an attempt to make the company's board entirely Polish, retaliated by restricting credits until
the new Polish directors were unable to pay the workmen regularly."

The "Times" noted that the company's mines and mills "employ 25,000 men and account for 45 percent of Poland's total steel output and 12 percent of her coal production. Two-thirds of the company's stock is owned by Friedrich Flick, a leading German steel industrialist, and the remainder is owned by interests in the United States."

In view of the fact that a great deal of Polish output was being exported to Hitler's Germany under depression conditions, the Polish government thought that Bush, Harriman, and their Nazi partners should at least pay
full taxes on their Polish holdings. The U.S. and Nazi owners responded with a lockout. The letter to Harriman in Washington reported a cable from their European representative: "Have undertaken new steps London Berlin ... please establish friendly relations with Polish Ambassador [in Washington]."

A 1935 Harriman Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker announced an agreement had been made "in Berlin" to sell an 8,000 block of their shares in Consolidated Silesian Steel. Note #1 Note #9 But the dispute with Poland did not deter the Bush family from continuing its partnership with Flick.

Nazi tanks and bombs "settled" this dispute in September, 1939 with the invasion of Poland, beginning World War II. The Nazi army had been equipped by Flick, Harriman, Walker, and Bush, with materials essentially stolen from Poland.

There were probably few people at the time who could appreciate the irony, that when the Soviets also attacked and invaded Poland from the East, their vehicles were fueled by oil pumped from Baku wells revived by the Harriman/Walker/Bush enterprise.

Three years later, nearly a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of the Nazis' share in the Silesian-American Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Enemy
nationals were said to own 49 percent of the common stock and 41.67 percent of the preferred stock of the company.

The order characterized the company as a "business enterprise within the United States, owned by [a front company in] Zurich, Switzerland, and held for the benefit of Bergwerksgesellschaft George von Giesche's Erben, a German corporation...." Note #2 Note #0

Bert Walker was still the senior director of the company, which he had founded back in 1926 simultaneously with the creation of the German Steel Trust. Ray Morris, Prescott's partner from Union Banking Corp. andBrown Brothers Harriman, was also a dir ector.

The investigative report prior to the government crackdown explained the "NATURE OF BUSINESS: The subject corporation is an American holding company for German and Polish subsidiaries, which own large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia, Poland and Germany. Since September 1939, these properties have been in the possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country in its war effort." Note #2 Note #1

The report noted that the American stockholders hoped to regain control of the European properties after the war.

4. Control of Nazi Commerce

Bert Walker had arranged the credits Harriman needed to take control of the Hamburg-Amerika Line back in 1920. Walker had organized the "American Ship and Commerce Corp." as a unit of the W.A. Harriman & Co., with contractual power over Hamburg-Amerika's affairs.

As the Hitler project went into high gear, Harriman-Bush shares in American Ship and Commerce Corp. were held by the Harriman Fifteen Corp., run by Prescott Bush and Bert Walker. Note #2 Note #2

It was a convenient stroll for the well-tanned, athletic, handsome Prescott Bush. From the Brown Brothers Harriman skyscraper at 59 Wall Street -- where he was senior managing partner, confidential investments manager and advisor to Averell and his brother "Bunny" -- he walked across to the Harriman Fifteen Corporation at One Wall Street, otherwise known as G.H. Walker & Co. -- and around the corner to his subsidiary offices at 39 Broadway, former home of the old W.A. Harriman & Co., and still the offices
for American Ship and Commerce, and of the Union Banking Corporation.

In many ways, Bush's Hamburg-Amerika Line was the pivot for the entire Hitler project.

Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over the steamship company in 1920 in negotiations with its post-World War I chief executive, "Wilhelm Cuno", and with the line's bankers, M.M. Warburg. Cuno was
thereafter completely dependent on the Anglo-Americans, and became a member of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In the 1930-32 drive for a Hitler dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi Party.
Note #2 Note #3

"Albert Voegler" was chief executive of the Thyssen-Flick German Steel Trust for which Bush's Union Banking Corp. was the New York office. He was a director of the Bush-affiliate BHS Bank in Rotterdam, and a director of the Harriman-Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line. Voegler joined Thyssen and Flick in their heavy 1930-33 Nazi contributions, and helped organize the final Nazi leap into national power. Note #2 Note #4

The "Schroeder" family of bankers was a linchpin for the Nazi activities of Harriman and Prescott Bush, closely tied to their lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles. Baron Kurt von Schroeder was co-director of the massive Thyssen-Huette foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush's New York bank partner. Kurt von Schroeder was treasurer of the support organization for the Nazi Party's private armies, to which Friedrich Flick contributed. Kurt von Schroeder and Montagu Norman's proteaageaa Hjalmar Schacht together made the final arrangments for Hitler to enter the government. Note #2 Note #5

Baron Rudolph von Schroeder was vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Long an intimate contact of Averell Harriman's in Germany, Baron Rudolph sent his grandson Baron Johann Rudolph for a tour of Prescott Bush's Brown Brothers Harriman offices in New York City in December 1932 -- on the eve of their Hitler-triumph. Note #2 Note #6

Certain actions taken directly by the Harriman-Bush shipping line in 1932 must be ranked among the gravest acts of treason in this century. The U.S. Embassy in Berlin reported back to Washington that the "costly
election campaigns" and "the cost of maintaining a private army of 300,000 to 400,000 men" had raised questions as to the Nazis' financial backers.  The constitutional government of the German republic moved to defend national freedom by ordering the Nazi Party private armies disbanded. The U.S. Embassy reported that the "Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and distributing propaganda attacks against the German government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown on Hitler's forces." Note #2 Note #7

Thousands of German opponents of Hitlerism were shot or intimidated by privately armed Nazi Brown Shirts. In this connection, we note that the original "Merchant of Death," Samuel Pryor, was a founding director of both the Union Banking Corp. and the American Ship and Commerce Corp. Since Mr. Pryor was executive committee chairman of Remington Arms and a central figure in the world's private arms traffic, his use to the Hitler project was enhanced as the Bush family's partner in Nazi Party banking and trans-Atlantic shipping.

The U.S. Senate arms-traffic investigators probed Remington after it was joined in a cartel agreement on explosives to the Nazi firm I.G. Farben. Looking at the period leading up to Hitler's seizure of power, the senators found that "German political associations, like the Nazi and others, are nearly all armed with American ... guns.... Arms of all kinds coming from America are transshipped in the Scheldt to river barges before the vessels arrive in Antwerp. They then can be carried through Holland without police inspection or interference. The Hitlerists and Communists are presumed to get arms in this manner. The principal arms coming from America are Thompson submachine guns and revolvers. The number is great." Note #2 Note #8

The beginning of the Hitler regime brought some bizarre changes to the Hamburg-Amerika Line -- and more betrayals.

Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. notified Max Warburg of Hamburg, Germany, on March 7, 1933, that Warburg was to be the corporation's official, designated representative on the board of Hamburg-Amerika. Note #2 Note #9

Max Warburg replied on March 27, 1933, assuring his American sponsors that the Hitler government was good for Germany: "For the last few years business was considerably better than we had anticipated, but a reaction is
making itself felt for some months. We are actually suffering also under the very active propaganda against Germany, caused by some unpleasant circumstances. These occurrences were the natural consequence of the very excited election campaign, but were extraordinarily exaggerated in the foreign press. The Government is firmly resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, and I feel perfectly convinced in this respect that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever." Note #3 Note #0

This seal of approval for Hitler, coming from a famous Jew, was just what Harriman and Bush required, for they anticipated rather serious "alarm" inside the U.S.A. against their Nazi operations.

On March 29, 1933, two days after Max's letter to Harriman, Max's son Erich sent a cable to his cousin Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman railroad system. He asked Frederick to "use all your influence" to stop all anti-Nazi activity in America, including "atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in foreign press, mass meetings, etc." Frederick cabled back to Erich: "No responsible groups here [are] urging [a] boycott [of] German goods[,] merely excited individuals." Two days after that, On March 31, 1933, the "American-Jewish Committee," controlled by the Warburgs, and the "B'nai B'rith," heavily influenced by the Sulzbergers' ("New York Times"), issued a formal, official joint statement of the two organizations, counselling "that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged, [and advising] ... that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed." Note #3 Note #1

The American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith (mother of the "Anti-Defamation League") continued with this hardline, no-attack-on-Hitler stance all through the 1930s, blunting the fight mounted by many Jews and
other anti-fascists. Thus the decisive interchange reproduced above, taking place entirely within the orbit of the Harriman/Bush firm, may explain something of the relation ship of George Bush to American Jewish and Zionist leaders. Some of them, in close cooperation with his family, played an ugly part in the drama of Naziism. Is this why "professional Nazi-hunters" have never discovered how the Bush family made its money?

-* * *-

The executive board of the "Hamburg Amerika Line" "(Hapag)" met jointly with the North German Lloyd company board in Hamburg on September 5, 1933. Under official Nazi supervision, the two firms were merged. Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. installed Christian J. Beck, a longtime Harriman executive, as manager of freight and operations in North America for the new joint Nazi shipping lines "(Hapag-Lloyd)") on November 4, 1933.

According to testimony of officials of the companies before Congress in 1934, a supervisor from the "Nazi Labor Front" rode with every ship of the Harriman-Bush line; employees of the New York offices were directly
organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization; Hamburg-Amerika provided free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the line subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done in Germany against the constitutional German government. Note #3 Note #2

In mid-1936, Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. cabled M.M. Warburg, asking Warburg to represent the company's heavy share interest at the forthcoming Hamburg-Amerika stockholders meeting. The Warburg office replied with the information that "we represented you" at the stockholders meeting and "exercised on your behalf your voting power for Rm [gold marks] 3,509,600 Hapag stock deposited with us."

The Warburgs transmitted a letter received from Emil Helfferich, German chief executive of both Hapag-Lloyd and of the Standard Oil subsidiary in Nazi Germany: "It is the intention to continue the relations with Mr. Harriman on the same basis as heretofore...." In a colorful gesture, Hapag's Nazi chairman Helfferich sent the line's president across the Atlantic on a Zeppelin to confer with their New York string-pullers.

After the meeting with the Zeppelin passenger, the Harriman-Bush office replied: "I am glad to learn that Mr. Hellferich [sic] has stated that relations between the Hamburg American Line and ourselves will be continued
on the same basis as heretofore." Note #3 Note #3

Two months before moving against Bush's Union Banking Corp., the U.S. government ordered the seizure of all property of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and North German Lloyd, under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The investigators noted in the pre-seizure report that Christian J. Beck was still acting as an attorney representing the Nazi firm. Note #3 Note #4

In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The "Harriman International Co.," led by Averell Harriman's first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct "all exports from Hitler's Germany to the United States". Note #3 Note #5

This pact had been negotiated in Berlin between Hitler's economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles, international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises, with the counsel of Max Warburg and Kurt von Schroeder.

John Foster Dulles would later be U.S. Secretary of State, and the great power in the Republican Party of the 1950s. Foster's friendship and that of his brother Allen (head of the Central Intelligence Agency), greatly aided
Prescott Bush to become the Republican U.S. senator from Connecticut. And it was to be of inestimable value to George Bush, in his ascent to the heights of "covert action government," that both of these Dulles brothers
were the lawyers for the Bush family's far-flung enterprise.

Throughout the 1930s, John Foster Dulles arranged debt restructuring for German firms under a series of decrees issued by Adolf Hitler. In these deals, Dulles struck a balance between the interest owed to selected,
larger investors, and the needs of the growing Nazi warmaking apparatus for producing tanks, poison gas, etc.

Dulles wrote to Prescott Bush in 1937 concerning one such arrangement. The German-Atlantic Cable Company, owning Nazi Germany's only telegraph channel to the United States, had made debt and management agreements with the Walker-Harriman bank during the 1920s. A new decree would now void those agreements, which had originally been reached with non-Nazi corporate officials. Dulles asked Bush, who managed these affairs for Averell Harriman, to get Averell's signature on a letter to Nazi officials, agreeing to the changes. Dulles wrote: "Sept. 22, 1937 "Mr. Prescott S. Bush "59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y.

"Dear Press,

"I have looked over the letter of the German-American [sic] Cable Company to Averell Harriman.... It would appear that the only rights in the matter are those which inure in the bankers and that no legal embarrassment would result, so far as the bondholders are concerned, by your acquiescence in the modification of the bankers' agreement.

"Sincerely yours,

"John Foster Dulles"

Dulles enclosed a proposed draft reply, Bush got Harriman's signature, and the changes went through. Note #3 Note #6

In conjunction with these arrangements, the German Atlantic Cable Company attempted to stop payment on its debts to smaller American bondholders. The money was to be used instead for arming the Nazi state, under a decree of the Hitler government.

Despite the busy efforts of Bush and Dulles, a New York court decided that this particular Hitler "law" was invalid in the United States; small bondholders, not parties to deals between the bankers and the Nazis, were
entitled to get paid. Note #3 Note #7

In this and a few other of the attempted swindles, the intended victims came out with their money. But the Nazi financial and political reorganization went ahead to its tragic climax. For his part in the Hitler revolution, Prescott Bush was paid a fortune.

This is the legacy he left to his son, President George Bush.

Notes

1. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 248. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed October 20, 1942; F.R. Doc. 42-11568; Filed, November 6, 1942. 7 Fed. Reg. 9097 (November 7, 1942).

The "New York City Directory of Directors", 1930s-40s, list Prescott Bush as a director of Union Banking Corp. from 1934 through 1943.

2. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 259: Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation; Vesting Order Number 261: Holland-American Trading Corp.

3. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp.

4. "New York Times," December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page 25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department. Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: "The Union Banking
Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway."

The "Times" omitted the fact that the Union Banking Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with the enemy, and the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the government's Alien Property Custodian.

5. Fritz Thyssen, "I Paid Hitler", 1941, reprinted in (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), p. 133. Thyssen says his contributions began with 100,000 marks given in October 1923, for Hitler's attempted "putsch" against the constitutional government.

6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin, to the U.S. Secretary of State, April 20, 1932, on microfilm in "Confidential Reports of U.S. State Dept., 1930s, Germany," at major U.S. libraries.

7. October 5, 1942, Memorandum to the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. Note Record Group 131,
Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order Number 248.

8. "Elimination of German Resources for War": Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Com mittee on Military Affairs, United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress; Part 5, Testimony of [the United States] Treasury
Department, July 2, 1945. Page 507: Table of Vereinigte Stahlwerke output, figures are percent of German total as of 1938; Thyssen organization including Union Banking Corporation pp. 727-731.

9. Robert Sobel, "The Life and Times of Dillon Read" (New York: Dutton-Penguin, 1991), pp. 92-111. The Dillon Read firm cooperated in the development of Sobel's book.

10. George Walker to Averell Harriman, August 11, 1927, in W. Averell Harriman papers, Library of Congress (hereafter "WAH papers").

11. "Iaccarino" to G. H. Walker, RCA Radiogram Sept. 12, 1927.

12. Andrew Boyle, "Montagu Norman" (London: Cassell, 1967).

Sir Henry Clay, "Lord Norman" (London, MacMillan & Co., 1957), pp. 18, 57, 70-71.

John A. Kouwenhouven, "Partners in Banking ... Brown Brothers Harriman" (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1969).

13. Coordination of much of the Hitler project took place at a single New York address. The Union Banking Corporation had been set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway. Management of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, carried out through Harriman's American Ship and Commerce Corp., was also set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway.

14. Interrogation of Fritz Thyssen, EF/Me/1 of Sept. 4, 1945 in U.S. Control Council records, photostat on page 167 in Anthony Sutton, "An Introduction to The Order" (Billings, Mt.: Liberty House Press, 1986).

15. "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B", by the Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, U. S. Government Printing Office, (Washington, D.C., 1948), pp. 1597, 1686.

16. "Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation - [minutes of the] Meeting of Board of Directors," October 31, 1930 (WAH papers), shows Averell Harriman as Chairman of the Board.

Prescott Bush to W.A. Harriman, Memorandum December 19, 1930 on their Harriman Fifteen Corp.

Annual Report of United Konigs and Laura Steel and Iron Works for the year 1930 (WAH papers) lists "Dr. Friedrich Flick ... Berlin" and "William Averell Harriman ... New York" on the Board of Directors.

"Harriman Fifteen Coporation Securities Position February 28, 1931," WAH papers. This report shows Harriman Fifteen Corporation holding 32,576 shares in Silesian Holding Co. V.T.C. worth (in scarce depression dollars) $1,628,800, just over half the value of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation's total holdings.

The "New York City Directory of Directors" volumes for the 1930s (available at the Library of Congress) show Prescott Sheldon Bush and W. Averell Harriman as the directors of Harriman Fifteen Corp.

"Appointments," (three typed pages) marked "Noted May 18 1931 W.A.H.," (among the papers from Prescott Bush's New York Office of Brown Brothers Harriman, WAH papers), lists a meeting between Averell Harriman and Friedrich Flick in Berlin at 4:00 P.M., Wednesday April 22, 1931. This was followed immediately by a meeting with Wilhelm Cuno, chief executive of the Hamburg-Amerika Line.

The "Report To the Stockholders of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation," October 19, 1933 (WAH papers) names G.H. Walker as president of the corporation. It shows the Harriman Fifteen Corp.'s address as 1 Wall Street -- the location of G.H. Walker and Co.

17. "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B", "op. cit.," p. 1686.

18. Jim Flaherty (a BBH manager, Prescott Bush's employee), March 19, 1934 to W.A. Harriman.

"Dear Averell:

"In Roland's absence Pres[cott] thought it adviseable for me to let you know that we received the following cable from [our European representative] Rossi dated March 17th [relating to conflict with the Polish government]...."

19. Harriman Fifteen Corporation notice to stockholders January 7, 1935, under the name of George Walker, President.

20. Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp. Executed November 17, 1942 Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Prop. Custodian. F.R. Doc. 42-14183; Filed, December 31, 1942; 8 Fed. Reg. 33 (Jan. 1, 1943).

The order confiscated the Nazis' holdings of 98,000 shares of common and 50,000 shares of preferred stock in
Silesian-American.

The Nazi parent company in Breslau, Germany wrote to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St. on Aug. 5, 1940, with "an invitation to take part in the regular meeting of the members of the Bergwerksgesellsc[h]aft Georg von Giesche's Erben...." WAH papers.

21. Sept. 25, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131,
Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order Number 370.

22. George Walker was a director of American Ship and Commerce from its organization through 1928. Consult "New York City Directory of Directors".

"Harriman Fifteen Corporation Securities Position February 28, 1931," "op. cit." The report lists 46,861 shares in the American Ship & Commerce Corp.

See "Message from Mr. Bullfin," August 30, 1934 (Harriman Fifteen section, WAH papers) for the joint supervision of Bush and Walker, respectively director and president of the corporation.

23. Cuno was later exposed by Walter Funk, Third Reich Press Chief and Under Secretary of Propaganda, in Funk's postwar jail cell at Nuremberg; but Cuno had died just as Hitler was taking power. William L. Shirer, L.,
"The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 144. "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B", "op. cit.," p. 1688.

24. See "Elimination of German Resources for War," "op. cit.," pages 881-882 on Voegler.

See Annual Report of the (Hamburg-Amerikanische-Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (Hapag or Hamburg-Amerika Line), March 1931, for the board of directors. A copy is in the New York Public Library Annex at 11th Avenue, Manhattan.

25. "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression -- Supplement B," "op. cit.," pp. 1178, 1453-1454, 1597, 1599.

See "Elimination of German Resources for War," "op. cit.," pp. 870-72 on Schroeder; p. 730 on Groeninger.

26. Annual Report of Hamburg-Amerika, "op. cit."

Baron Rudolph Schroeder, Sr. to Averell Harriman, November 14, 1932. K[night] W[ooley] handwritten note and draft reply letter, December 9, 1932.

In his letter, Baron Rudolph refers to the family's American affiliate, J. Henry Schroder [name anglicized], of which Allen Dulles was a director, and his brother John Foster Dulles was the principal attorney.

Baron Bruno Schroder of the British branch was adviser to Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman, and Baron Bruno's partner Frank Cyril Tiarks was Norman's co-director of the Bank of England throughout Norman's career.
Kurt von Schroeder was Hjalmar Schacht's delegate to the Bank for International Settlements in Geneva, where many of the financial arrangements for the Nazi regime were made by Montagu Norman, Schacht and
the Schroeders for several years of the Hitler regime right up to the outbreak of World War II.

27. Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin, "op. cit."

28. U.S. Senate "Nye Committee" hearings, Sept. 14, 1934, pp. 1197-1198, extracts from letters of Col. William N. Taylor, dated June 27, 1932 and January 9, 1933.

29. American Ship and Commerce Corporation to Dr. Max Warburg, March 7, 1933.

Max Warburg had brokered the sale of Hamburg-Amerika to Harriman and Walker in 1920. Max's brothers controlled the Kuhn Loeb investment banking house in New York, the firm which had staked old E.H. Harriman to his 1890s buyout of the giant Union Pacific Railroad.

Max Warburg had long worked with Lord Milner and others of the racialist British Round Table concerning joint projects in Africa and Eastern Europe. He was an advisor to Hjalmar Schacht for several decades and was a top executive of Hitler's Reichsbank. The reader may consult David Farrer, "The Warburgs: The Story of A Family" (New York: Stein and Day, 1975).

30. Max Warburg, at M.M. Warburg and Co., Hamburg, to Averill [sic] Harriman, c/o Messrs. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y., March 27, 1933.

31. This correspondence, and the joint statement of the Jewish organizations, are reproduced in Moshe R. Gottlieb, "American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-41: An Historical Analysis" (New York: Ktav Publishing
House, 1982).

32. "Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities": Public Hearings before A Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, United States House of Representatives, Seventy Third Congress, New York City, July 9-12, 1934 -- Hearings No. 73-NY-7 (Washington, D.C., U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1934).
See testimony of Capt. Frederick C. Mensing, John Schroeder, Paul von Lilienfeld-Toal, and summaries by Committee members.

See "New York Times," July 16, 1933, p. 12, for organizing of Nazi Labor Front at North German Lloyd, leading to Hamburg-Amerika after merger.

33. American Ship and Commerce Corporation telegram to Rudolph Brinckmann at M.M. Warburg, June 12, 1936.

Rudolph Brinckmann to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St., June 20, 1936, with enclosed note transmitting Helferrich's letter.

Reply to Dr. Rudolph Brinkmann c/o M.M. Warburg and Co, July 6, 1936, WAH papers. The file copy of this letter carries no signature, but is presumably from Averell Harriman.

34. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 126. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed August 28, 1942. F.R. Doc. 42-8774; Filed September 4, 1942, 10:55 A.M.; 7 F.R. 7061 (Number 176, Sept. 5, 1942.)

July 18, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order Number 126.

35. "New York Times," May 20, 1933. Leading up to this agreement is a telegram which somehow escaped the shredder. It is addressed to Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, dated May 11,
1933: "Much disappointed to have missed seeing you Tueday afternoon.... I hope to see you either in Washington or New York before you sail. with my regards W.A. Harriman" (WAH papers).

36. Dulles to Bush, letter and draft reply in WAH papers.

37. "New York Times," Jan. 19, 1938.

George H. Bush (left of clock) with the Skull and Crossbones group at Yale University, New Haven, CT circa 1947

Look who's standing to the left of the clock.

Class of 1900

seated (left to right)Frederick Baldwin Adams, Hulbert Taft.
Standing (left to right):

John Morgan Hopkins, Ashley Day Leavatt, Frank Dexter Cheney, Stuart Brown Camp, James Cowan Greenway, Malcolm Douglas, Corliss Esmonde Sullivan, John Walter Cross, Percy Avery Rockefeller, Brace Whitman Paddock, Frederic Winthrop Allen, George Armstrong Lyon.
 

''The men called their organization the Brotherhood of Death, or, more informally, the Order of Skull and Bones. They adopted the numerological symbol 322 because their group was the second chapter of the German organization and founded in 1832. They worshiped the goddess Eulogia, celebrated pirates, and plotted an underground conspiracy to dominate the world. Fast-forward 170 years. Skull and Bones has curled its tentacles into every corner of American society. This tiny club has set up networks that have thrust three members into the most powerful political position in the world. And the group's influence is only increasing-the 2004 presidential election might showcase the first time each ticket has been led by a Bonesman. The secret society is now, as one historian admonishes, " 'an international mafia'. . . unregulated and all but unknown." In its quest to create a New World Order that restricts individual freedoms and places ultimate power solely in the hands of a small cult of wealthy, prominent families, Skull and Bones has already succeeded in infiltrating nearly every major research, policy, financial, media, and government institution in the country. Skull and Bones, in fact, has been running the United States for years.''

"DON'T TASE ME BRO"

JUST FOR ASKING ABOUT THE SKULL AND BONES CONNECTION TO JOHN KERRY AND GEORGE W. BUSH

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My new hero, a Congressman that speaks the truth!

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Ok but that was the first President Bush with Skulls and here is the next in line to this sick elitist shit George W. Bush II hanging out with the same shit.  Whose oath does he honor more, Skulls or the American people, well it is all too obvious now, get to know these guys and girls now as they are fucking up America at alarming rates.  The head of the Department of Justice has fled, not for any other reason than the world has caught on, now we are joining in the wasting of this group of freaks who pray to old Nazi party values in Tombs and wear funny outfits and are sabotaging the Constitution. 

George Bush Jr. A Skull & Bones Anti-Catholic Freemason Surrounded by Apron Wearing Freemasons in Texas (2000 A.D.)
When asked on Meet the Press about 'Skull and Bones', listen to how President Bush answers: watch his demeanor: by clicking here

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http://endrtimes.blogspot.com/2007/09/skull-and-bones-codeword-barbelon.html

I thought you would all be interested in this snippet (an Excerpt) from a chapter of the book Codeword Barbêlôn.

—————— Chapter XXXII ——————

SKULL AND BONES: “IT’S PART OF WHO I AM”— THE HIGHEST MORAL AUTHORITY
 To assist in keeping up the deception, we will form secret societies and clubs… and so by fair means or by foul we shall gain our ends and carry on our dishonest proceedings with impunity. ~ Plato, The Republic. Book II, p.48.

“The pope is the ruler of the world. All the emperors, all the kings, all the princes, all the presidents of the world are as these altar boys of mine.” ~ D.S. Phelan, Catholic priest.

DURING HIS PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN of 2000, George W. Bush gave a 90-minute talk (on July 31) with the managing editor of the Illuminati controlled TIME magazine/CNN (so says Jesuit Professor Carroll Quigley: see later chapter titled “The Rhodes Gang”). At one point in the interview, Walter Isaacson asked Mr. Bush whether it troubled him at all that he had been initiated into the secret Society of Skull and Bones, to which Bush responded exuberantly, “No qualms at all. I was honored.”[1] The problem with that response is that the secrets of this Order mark its members as infidels and debauchees, with skeletons in their closets. The reason the ‘literary society’ of Skull and Bones is of particular concern is that its members are required to take an oath (see later) that completely absolves them from—takes precedence over—allegiance to any nation or king or government or constitution, including the negating of any subsequent oath which they may be required to take, that conflicts with the interests of the Order. To whom then do they swear their ultimate allegiance? We must go back to the origin of the Order to see the roots that sustain these branches.

Significantly, in the book Proofs of a Conspiracy (previously cited) Prof. Robison described the initiation ceremony into the “Regent Degree” of the Illuminati; and according to author Kris Millegan, in his book Fleshing Out Skull and Bones, “It [the Illuminati’s initiation ceremony] bears a striking resemblance to the… ritual for entry into Skull and Bones at Yale.” Kris Millegan, Fleshing Out Skull and Bones, op. cit., p. 17.

The oath taken by the Illuminati requires the initiated to disregard all bonds of allegiance whether to father, mother, brothers, sisters, relations, friends or to the king, magistrates, and any other authority to which loyalty, obedience, or service may have been sworn. The particular passage reads: “faithfulness and everlasting obedience to all superiors and regulations of the Order…. you are free from the so-called oath to country and laws: swear to reveal to the new chief… what you may have seen or done, intercepted, read or heard, learned or surmised, and also seek for and spy out what your eyes cannot discern. Honour and respect the Aqua Tofana (a slow poison) as a sure, prompt, and necessary means of purging the globe by death of those who seek to vilify the truth [their ideology] and seize it from our hands... in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

This brings us back nicely to the question of why Bush said in his autobiography: “[in] My senior year (at Yale) I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society, so secret, I can’t say anything more.”  Why not? Is that not a fair question to ask, intelligent reader? Bill Cooper says it is because: “Members of the Order take an oath that absolves them from any allegiance to any nation or king or government or constitution, and that includes the negating of any subsequent oath, which they may be required to take. They swear allegiance only to the Order and its goal of a New World Order... according to the oath Bush took when he was initiated into Skull and Bones, his oath of office as President of the United States means nothing.”

here is part of a 2000 interview (original transcript) given by the son, President George W. Bush Jr.:

 “TIME: But you [George W. Jnr.] sure shared a lot of the same upbringing: Andover, Yale, even Skull and Bones. Did you have any qualms, say, about joining an elite secret club like Bones?

 Bush: No qualms at all. I was honored. I was fairly nonchalant. I didn’t view it as a great heritage thing. I didn’t take it all that seriously.

TIME: Demystify it a bit for those who might think it’s a cross between a Masonic Lodge and the Trilateral Commission. Did your father show up for your initiation, like your grandfather showed up for his?

Bush: Without revealing all the great secrets? I got a few of my old club mates who could demystify it right off the bat. My dad didn’t tap me. Someone a year ahead of me tapped me. There was an entry celebration. I can’t remember whether my dad showed up or not…. ”

1 - Interview by Walter Isaacson, “George W. Bush: ‘My Heritage Is Part Of Who I Am.’” Time Magazine, August 7th 2000 (Time Volume 156, No. 6) ; also reported on cnn.com (Times/CNN, August 1, 2000): www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/08/01/bush.7_31.a.tm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI6e0MWqtQA

Conspiracy Too Monstrous To Conceive
By Henry Makow Ph.D.
"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists." J. Edgar Hoover

The world is in the malignant grip of a satanic cult.  People recoil at the suggestion but proof stares us in the face every day.  George W. Bush, President of the "Free World" is a member of "Skull and Bones" a chapter of the Illuminati order. His father, grandfather and uncle are also members.  In his autobiography, "A Charge to Keep" Bush writes, "My senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society so secret I can't say anything more." In Aug. 2000 he said his "heritage is part of who I am."

Isn't this a conflict of interest?

Hello! Can a man hold any public office, let alone the most important, and belong to a "secret society"? If this society were benign, would it have to be secret?

What a secret society it is! The Illuminati is the hidden hand behind all modern cataclysms, including the French and Russian Revolutions, Communism, the Depression and Nazism. To affect the course of history only takes money. The people behind the Illuminati have plenty.

It's time we faced reality. Murphy's Law applies to humanity. "If it can go wrong, it will."
It has. The world is ruled by a satanic cult.

THE ILLUMINATI AND THE SKULL & BONES

The Illuminati originates in the Jewish Kabala, Babylonian mystery cults, the Templars, Freemasons and assorted interests dedicated to Satan worship and absolute power. On May 1 1776, Adam Weishaupt, a professor at the University of Inglestadt in Germany, founded "The Order of the Illuminati." Many people believe Weishaupt was sponsored by Prince William of Hesse Casel and his banker Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the wealthiest man in the world.

The Illuminati's goal was to destroy Western Civilization and to erect a new world order ruled by them. Its method was to dissolve all social ties (employer, nation, religion, race, family) by exploiting social discontent and promising a golden age of "human brotherhood." This is now called "globalization."

Attracted by the promise of power and change, people served without realizing who or what they were supporting. Weishaupt urged his followers to "practise the art of counterfeit." New recruits were told the Illuminati expressed the original spirit of Christianity. Weishaupt marvelled that even churchmen could be gulled. "Oh! Men, of what cannot you be persuaded?" (Nesta Webster, World Revolution, 1921, p. 27)

Bush & Kerry Admit Membership in Skull & Bones - Either way America, the Republican & Democratic Parties Lose.  The American People stuck with a Skull Fucker, all was then lost

After reading all that, that is all they have, a bunch of spoiled rotten third generation rich kids, blowing smoke up your ass as to how powerful they are using Nazi type propaganda.  We as American's have faced much bigger threats to our country but they use propaganda to make you think you are a helpless victim, with no way to fight city hall or corruption.  Did we really sell out our freedoms and allow them to change the Constitution over Saddam and Osama. 

Over 52 terrorists?   Come on America, take back America and hit them where it hurts, in their trust funds.  Then they will go get jobs or kill themselves or something more productive than ruining the country and destroying the Constitution.  I say any politician who was involved in making one penny from the war for war profiteering be tried 3400 times for each dead American that bloodied the price at the pump. 

If Cheney or Bush made money via Halliburton or others, they should be stripped of all and hung at dawn, ropes provided free on Iviewit.  Show up early as the matinee hangings of their accomplices should be fun too, be sure to bring the kids so that they may learn what happens to treasonous treacherous men.  That is if you can catch them before they commit suicide like the Fuehrer they worship.  I mean to even know the President is involved admittedly in the occult Nazi cult The Order of Death and has sworn allegiance to that versus your family or countries best interest, is enough to try him, if not, then what, we have to catch him with an intern and cigar?

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GEORGE ORWELL

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

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Is Skull and Bones ripping off the IRS?

http://www.bear-left.com/original/2001/0422skul.html

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From the Existentialist Cowboy

http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2007/10/bush-desparately-seeking-world-war-iii.html  

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Bush desperately seeking World War III

At a recent press briefing Bush was asked about Vladimir Putin's plans to hold on to power when his term runs out. Bush smirked and quipped: "I've been planning that myself." We should take Bush at his word. We should take that remark just as seriously as his recent veiled threat of World War III. We should take it as seriously as we should have taken his remark about how much easier it would all be "...if this was a dictatorship!"

So I told people [European leaders] that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested" in ensuring Iran not gain the capacity to develop such weapons.

--George W. Bush, Sociopath-in-Chief

How seriously should we take Bush's offhand remarks? His quips and unguarded remarks are the only truths to come out of his mouth. That applies to sinister references to summary executions in his 2003 State of the Union address: "Let's just say they are no longer a threat to the United States of America." It applies as well to his wistful longing for "dictatorship". Certainly, Bush is articulate only when he speaks of death, torture, vengence, warfare, execution, or punishment. He never stumbles, he never struggles to find the right word to describe pain, death or suffering!!

More recently, the temporal proximity of his "warnings" of WWIII and his "quip" about staying in power after his term, may be clues to what is in fact talked about inside the Oval Office.

Despite the president's occasional contempt for the law, THREAT LEVEL doesn't believe that he's going to declare a state of emergency and cancel the 2008 election. But in July, we filed some FOIA requests anyway. We asked five Justice Department offices for documents produced or revised after August 2001 "addressing the feasibility, advisability or lawfulness of deferring, rescheduling or canceling a US national election."

Bush Quips He Might Stay in Power (Threat Level Plays Along

Simply, the mechanisms by which Bush achieves his permanent dictatorship are already in place. Another terrorist attack will do the trick. [See How a Second Terrorist Attack Will Benefit George W. Bush] Measured against our standard, the Bush administration is a catastrophe. Measured against Bush's hidden agenda, he is very near to achieving what Richard Nixon could not --an absolute dictatorship in the United States. That means, of course, that Bush will have reduced Congress to a debating club, the Supreme Court to a mere advisory panel. Sadly, it is SCOTUS who helped write themselves out of a real job. Fools!

The most ominous new development is the Bush administration's push to name the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization.

"The U.S. has designated any number of states over the years as state sponsors of terrorism," says Leverett. "But here for the first time the U.S. is saying that part of a government is itself a terrorist organization."

This is what Leverett and Mann fear will happen: The diplomatic effort in the United Nations will fail when it becomes clear that Russia's and China's geopolitical ambitions will not accommodate the inconvenience of energy sanctions against Iran.

--The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran

What Bush has done already may be summarized briefly:

He lied the nation into two wars. Neither have been won, neither had anything to do with the perpetrators of 911!

Against our own US criminal codes and numerous international treaties, Bush has arrogated unto himself the power to abduct, imprison and torture anyone that he decides is an "enemy". He has assumed for himself a title: "Decider".

He has built up a private army, a Praetorian Guard, to enforce his edicts: Blackwater USA.

Is Bush capable of starting WWIII, nuking Iran, staying put after his term ends? In a word --yes! Bush "gets off" on death. Immediately prior to his announcement that the US military was in action in Iraq, Bush --unaware that cameras were on and broadcasting --"pumped his fist" and declared: "I feel GOOD!"

Bush savors the little hints he drops, disguising them as "quips" or un-funny jokes. Tucker Carlson reported that Bush puckered his lips to mock Carla Fay Tucker's final plea for her life. "Please, Mr. Bush, don't kill me", he whined. As Governor of Texas, Bush chalked up 152 "kills" of many who were never competently defended, who were convicted upon phony or unreliable evidence, whose cases were tainted by dubious psychiatric evidence.

One need not be a licensed therapist to call him a sociopathic nut job, a threat to humankind and Western Civilization. He is clearly without empathy --that human quality upon which ethics and morality are based. Dr. Gustav Gilbert was the American psychologist who interviewed Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. Based on his research there, Gilbert concluded that evil was best described as an utter lack of empathy. Bush is, therefore, at the very least, a psychopathic monster, for the theologically inclined --a Satan incarnate.

"Sociopathy can be recognized early in an individual. Before the age of around 15 - 16 years, a child showing sociopathic traits is titled with conduct disorder. Signs of this early stage of sociopathy might include immunity to parental punishment and pain. Other signs may be the torturing of animals, fire setting, vandalism, consistent lying, theft, or aggression towards others. Nothing usually works in trying to change the behavior of this type of child. Therefore, the parent(s) usually give up, making the situation worse. But it must be noted that many children with conduct disorder do not progress on to sociopaths. After the age of 15 - 16, those who continue to show sociopathic signs are then labeled as having sociopathy or antisocial personality disorder

Carter & Golant, 1998; Sabbatini, 1998; See also: Horton, The Sociopath

Old friends who knew Bush as a boy describe a diabolical monster who reveled in inflicting pain and suffering. They verify a well-circulated story that the Junior Bush used to shove firecrackers up horned frogs to watch them explode when he tossed them into the air. The New York Times reported that at Yale during his Skull and Bones days, Bush indulged the sadistic practice of "branding" fraternity pledges with "brands" made of metal coat hangers. The blind folded pledges still have the scars to prove it. Li'l George promised never do it again but never figured out why others thought it such a "big deal". Tragically for the world, li'l George now has nukes with which to bully the world.

Dick Cheney, Halliburton's plant inside the Bush administration, can be counted on to look after the interests of big, no-bid contractors, primarily his own Halliburton. It says a lot about him that he actually likes being called "Darth". Recently the Guardian reported that "Darth" may be winning the behind the scenes maneauvering in Bush's evil empire.

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.

The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: “Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo.”

--Guardian Unlimited

A false-flag operation is most certainly on the table. Every US president has made such plans, notably Nixon's "Operation Garden Plot" and Reagan's "REX 84 Alpha". "Executive Directive 51" is absurdly vague about when and how Bush may declare his dictatorship, describing only a "catastrophic emergency."

Catastrophic Emergency" means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the US population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.

--"Executive Directive 51"

In other words, Bush will simply declare an emergency following any "second terrorist" attack, terrorism being whatever Bush decides it is.

The Washington source said Mr Bush and Mr Cheney did not trust any potential successors in the White House, Republican or Democratic, to deal with Iran decisively. They are also reluctant for Israel to carry out any strikes because the US would get the blame in the region anyway.

"The red line is not in Iran. The red line is in Israel. If Israel is adamant it will attack, the US will have to take decisive action," Mr Cronin said. "The choices are: tell Israel no, let Israel do the job, or do the job yourself."

Almost half of the US's 277 warships are stationed close to Iran, including two aircraft carrier groups. The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise left Virginia last week for the Gulf. A Pentagon spokesman said it was to replace the USS Nimitz and there would be no overlap that would mean three carriers in Gulf at the same time.

--Cheney pushes Bush to act on Iran, Guardian Unlimited

Bush will declare martial law, postpone the 2008 elections indefinitely, and assume a title: Imperial Decider Guy, or some other bullshit title of his psychotic imagining

Scenario for 2008: Sometime in middle to late summer, perhaps early fall, a "terrorist attack," or a natural disaster occurs, allowing Bush to suspend the elections in the name of "national security," and take the control of the government via the "National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51" and "Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20," released by the WH May 9th of this year. He could remain in control as long as he wanted. Now, wouldn't THAT be an interesting nightmare?

--Naomi Wolf, Huffington Post

Given the quagmire in Iraq, Bush will be "forced" to nuke Iran, having secretly hoped for the opportunity. Iran will blockade the straits of Hormuz and attack US fleets in the Gulf and Mediterranean. World War III will have begun.

Bush will call his dictatorship a "Constitutional Continuity" enabled for the sake of the father...uh..."the homeland".

Aided and abetted by right-wing Republicans and spineless Democrats in Congress he has rendered the Constitution utterly useless as an instrument for protecting the people from his authoritarian excesses. He has offered his profane opinion of the Constitution thus, "... it's just a God-damned piece of paper''

--Doug Thompson in Capitol Hill Blue, Dec 5, 2005.

Quietly, and without solemn ceremony, the law of the land, the very rule of law, i.e, the US Constitution will be set aside, as, in fact, it already has been. A few "bitter enders" may object only to find themselves interred in FEMA camps, KBR contructed "detention centers" built to accommodate anyone opposing the Imperial Decider Guy.

When Bush ordered the war of aggression against Iraq, Saddam was in the process of converting petro-dollars to Euros. Among US motivations for Middle East wars of aggression, the war against Iraq has not had the effect of shoring up the dollar. Bush fails again. Bush seems content, however, to balance the US trade deficit upon the backs of the middle class and the poor, already bearing the brunt of his tax cuts for tiny rich elites.

The terms sociopath or psychopath often bring to mind images of sadistically violent individuals such as Ted Bundy or the fictional character of Dr. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter in the book and movie The Silence of the Lambs. But I believe the defining characteristic traits of sociopaths actually cover a much broader spectrum of individuals than most of us would ever imagine. The sociopath is that truly self-absorbed individual with no conscience or feeling for others [emphasis mine, LH] and for whom social rules have no meaning. I believe that most all of us know or have come in contact with sociopathic individuals without even knowing it.

-- Horton, The Sociopath

Indeed, we have. He occupies the Oval Office, a lofty perch from which he bullies the world and threatens, perhaps forever, the precious few chances we have for peace, plenty and prosperity.

Bush Eloquent and TOO Emphatic
on his Favorite Subject: Torture!

Who are the Nazi's Now - Fascism Comes to America

Additional resources
 

Sun sets early on the American Century

Torture, Paramilitarism, Occupation and Genocide

US Treasury Holds Disaster Drill in Tampa Bay

Why is the 9/11 'Fringe' Movement So Mainstream?The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran

KBR awarded Homeland Security contract (Concentration Camp Construction) worth up to $385M

"The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster, the company said."

From What Really Happened: Straitjacket Bush

National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive

The Praetorian Guard: The U. S. Role in the New World Order

 

Discoveries

Valerie Plame on Sixty Minutes (Excerpts)

Talk by Naomi Wolf - The End of America

Bette Midler - One For My Baby

The Existentialist Cowboy

Second Attack
Sociopath
Indict Bush
Bush Dictatorship
GOP Crime Syndicate
Iraq

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Republican Culture of Corruption: 2007 So Far

Fellow blogger "SenateGuru2008" has a great run down of the Republican Party's recent ethics problems and criminal behavior. It doen't look like they learned anything from their 2006 humiliation.
 

Does it seem like there's a new Republican scandal in the news every single week? Well, that may be because there is:

January 23, 2007: Republican radio personality Scott Eller Cortelyou of Denver arrested on suspicion of using the Internet to lure a child into a sexual relationship

January 29, 2007: Republican former Jefferson County, Colorado, Treasurer Mark Paschall indicted on two felony charges "in connection with an allegation that Paschall solicited a kickback from a bonus he awarded one of his employees"

January 31, 2007: Republican Congressman Gary Miller is named by Republicans as ranking member of oversight subcommittee of House Financial Services Committee despite the FBI's investigation into his land deals

February 14, 2007: Major Republican fundraiser Brent Wilkes and former CIA executive director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo are indicted by a grandy jury for corrupting CIA contracts

March 5, 2007: Ethics complaint filed against Republican Senator Pete Domenici for his role in the Attorney Purge scandal

March 6, 2007: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney found guilty of obstruction of justice and perjury

March 8, 2007: Republican former U.S. Congressman and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich admits to extramarital affair

March 23, 2007: Former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles, an oil and gas lobbyist who became an architect of George W. Bush's energy policies, pleads guilty to obstructing justice by lying to a Senate committee

March 27, 2007: Criminal charges filed against Republican Pennsylvania State Senator Robert Regola in connection with the death of a teenage neighbor who was shot with the senator's gun; he is accused of three counts of perjury, allowing possession of a firearm by a minor, recklessly endangering another person and false swearing

March 27, 2007: Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, "indicted on charges of defrauding investors and banks of $1.6 billion while chairman of Collins & Aikman Corp., an auto parts maker that collapsed days after he quit"

March 28, 2007: Robert Vellanoweth, a Republican activist and appointee of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, is arrested on suspicion of gross vehicular manslaughter and felony driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, after a crash that killed three adults and one child

April 18, 2007: The FBI raids the home of Republican Congressman John Doolittle, investigating his ties to Jack Abramoff

April 19, 2007: The FBI raids a business tied to the family of Republican Congressman Rick Renzi, as part of an investigation into his business dealings

April 23, 2007: The FBI questions Republican Congressman Tom Feeney about his dealings with Jack Abramoff

April 23, 2007: Federal auditors find repeat violations of federal election law from the 2004 Senate campaign of Republican Senator Mel Martinez, Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

April 26, 2007: David Huckabee, son of Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, is arrested at an Arkansas airport after a federal X-ray technician detected a loaded gun in his carry-on luggage

May 4, 2007: Republican state Assemblyman Michael Cole is censured and stripped of his leadership position after the married father of two spent the night at a 21-year-old intern's apartment

May 11, 2007: A field coordinator for Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry is indicted for voter fraud in North Carolina

May 12, 2007: NBC News breaks the story that the FBI is investigating Republican Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons for suspicion of accepting bribes in exchange for securing government contracts

May 15, 2007: Connecticut Republican Party Chairman Chris Healy is arrested for drunk driving (he pled no contest on June 1, but didn't publicly disclose the event until June 11)

May 18, 2007: Republican former South Dakota State Representative Ted Klaudt is charged with eight counts of second-degree rape, two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, one count of sexual contact with a child younger than 16, two counts of witness tampering and one count of stalking against two foster children in his care

June 11, 2007: Republican Senator Larry Craig is arrested for lewd conduct in the men's bathroom of an airport

June 19, 2007: South Carolina Republican state Treasurer and South Carolina Chairman of Giuliani for President Thomas Ravenel is indicted by a grand jury on cocaine distribution charges

July 3, 2007: A grand jury report declares that the sale of public land to Republican Congressman Ken Calvert and his business partners violated the law

July 11, 2007: Republican state Representative and Florida co-Chairman of McCain for President Bob Allen is arrested for soliciting a male undercover police officer, offering to pay $20 to perform oral sex

July 16, 2007: Republican Senator David Vitter holds press conference acknowledging being on the D.C. Madam's list and past involvement with prostitutes

July 16, 2007: Story breaks that Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski was involved in a sweetheart real estate deal

July 24, 2007: Michael Flory, former head of the Michigan Federation of Young Republicans, pleads guilty to sexual abuse

July 26, 2007: Media report that Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski will sell back land purchased in a sweetheart deal, following close scrutiny of the shady transaction

July 29, 2007: Glenn Murphy Jr., recently-elected Chairman of the Young Republican National Federation, is accused of sexually assaulting a sleeping man

July 30, 2007: The FBI and IRS raid the home of Republican Senator Ted Stevens following investigations into Stevens' dealings with the corrupt VECO Corporation

August 2, 2007: Bush administration senior adviser Karl Rove disregards a Congressional subpoena and refuses to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee

August 6, 2007: House Republican Leader John Boehner leaked classified information regarding a secret court ruling over warrantless wiretapping

August 8, 2007: Republican Senator Larry Craig pleads guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct following his June 11 arrest

August 9, 2007: Major Republican donor Alan Fabian is charged with 23 counts of bankruptcy fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and perjury

August 22, 2007: Republican consultant Roger Stone resigns his role with the New York state Senate Republicans after reports surfaced that he made a "threatening, obscenity-laced" phone call to the 83-year-old father of Governor Eliot Spitzer

August 27, 2007: Story breaks that Republican Senator Larry Craig was arrested and pled guilty - he had not publicly disclosed the events to that point

SCANDALS SINCE THE FOX GOT IN THE HENHOUSE

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but morally treasonable to the American public."

I guess that says that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove, etc. should not be impeached but tried for treason!

Patents suspended due to the investigation of fraud on the United States Patent & Trademark Offices and other federal, state and international felonies against these criminals named herein.

The claim before investigators is that the technologies were invented by the Iviewit inventors, not their lawyers from Proskauer Rose, LLP, Meltzer Lippe Goldstein Wolfe and Schlissel and Foley and Lardner and how it is that through Proskauer's acquisition of Rubenstein and the MPEGLA LLC patent pooling scheme they have converted those technologies to inure benefits for their law firms.  How they have denied due process through a series of obscene public office corruptions will be clearer as you understand how they knew to block the evidence and witness was to seize the government.

The crooks are far more insidious than your run of the mill mobster as they have legal degrees and so are able to deny due process through planting criminals in their organization in public offices, including the courts, at every level.  Sounds far fetched, outrageous, not really if you are trying to rob the United States Patent Office and the United States.  A crime like this is not committed by one man, it take a criminal enterprise with tentacles deep within the government and when you are caught with evidence and witness against you, you need a lot of payola and a lot of criminals disguised as lawyers, politicians, justice officials as getting caught could destroy your entire criminal enterprise.  You must risk everything to block due process, even if you have to seize the government from top down, even if you have to fix elections.  Even if you have to put your criminals into Justice Department roles like say Attorney General.  Fighting for your life leaves one this desperate but as you will see, these criminals are not just ordinary criminals, they have been plotting to overthrow Democracy since Hitler failed, the Iviewit inventors just stumbled into the lions den and brought what they heralded as the Holy Grail, they should have thought that through before making the grab but greed beholden attorneys cannot see.

Hmmmmm.  When were the Presidential elections held that were decided by a crooked judge in Florida, Jorge Labarga, who blocked a recount of the People's vote for President that was fraught with fraud in that critical state, who passed it to the corrupt Florida Supreme Court, who pushed it further up to the Supreme Court.  The Supreme's should have demanded a recount of the People's vote and instead pulled a fast one on the nation and selected their boy Bush and Cheney, cronyism playing part as most of the Justices were picked by Republican Presidents aligned with secret cult organizations, like Skull and Bones and the Federalists, the long awaited plan of overthrow came with that decision by the Court to force a Decider upon the People.  With no basis in law, these Justices usurped the fundamental of Democracy, a leader chosen by the People and instead gave us a President from their 5-4 decision steeped in conflict with the candidates.  Since that time, this country has been on a crash course to hell for the People, with no one to stop it, all checks and balances removed, public servants who boldly claim they are above the law, positioning of idiot friends and family to key government posts who are unqualified and therefore easy to claim they did not know how the agency was robbed and mismanaged, unimaginable but true.

Funny that election fraud coincides exactly with the time that Arthur Andersen first exposed that Iviewit had problems, that technologies were being transferred to illegally set up corporations bearing similar name to Iviewit but with no books showing the owners, that unauthorized technology transfers were being inked with Enron's newly created Broadband division (that should raise the brow).  Knowing that this would expose them, plans were made between the criminals to block due process and destroy everyone who was catching on to their scam.  Immediately thereafter, Arthur Andersen and Enron where destroyed, to hide any evidence that had been being gathered, plans were made to destroy any one else.  Yet, that was not enough, as the criminals being smart guys gone sociopath knew that investigations would be forthcoming and the knew the only way to stop due process entirely was to siege the institutions that control due process from the top down.  Once a President that was planted, they could appoint various corrupt friends in key government posts to stop almost any complaint as it elevated.

Now this Administration of Organized Crime and our Deciders Bush and Cheney are facing, sooner or later, trials for; war crimes, war mongering and profiteering, human torture, oil profiteering racketeering and price fixing, possible involvement in the Trade Center bombings to incite fear in the People and take them to war on falsified intel and fraudulent documents, exposing CIA covert agents who would opposed their regime, intimidation of government officials via showing up at their Intensive Care Unit bedsides with documents to sign for illegal programs to be enacted to legislation by resigned Attorney General Ashcroft who refuted the program as illegal, shot gunning people in the face, stealing inventions, robbing the Patent Office and all together TREASON.

One must give these guys credit for their treasonous attempts, as they have so taken control of the government, the press and all checks and balances of our nation, that for all those alleged crimes above they act as if they are above law, unafraid of impeachment, where Clinton had impeachment charges for a blow job, I mean come America, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck...

Another duck here though is the American People or sitting ducks, swayed to believe whatever this corrupt group throws at them, as again they have removed checks and balances so that their crimes cannot be tried or even brought against them.  Ask how they have spun all of the following and used media to create false history, false truth and brainwash the American Sheep to believe horseshit:

An illegal war in Iraq, against a country that never harbored a terrorist group, had nothing to do with 9/11 (as Hussein liked no other terrorist in Iraq other than himself) and spun it into a justifiable war even when evidence showed it was based on falsified intel,

To make Americans take pity on I. Scooter (Poopsy) Libby while hating Valerie Plame, an esteemed servant in the CIA whose husband tried to expose the Sheep to the fact that the intel they were going to war with Iraq on was false and then denying Valerie and her husband Joe civil rights, while exculpating Libby from his treasonous and felonious crimes he was tried for in exposing her, through Presidential interference with no basis in law,

To believe that Iraq had Al Qaeda or Al Queda or Al Kida as Bush pronounces it, whatever the hell that is, in its country plotting the overthrow of America when none of these "Terrorists" have any form of army or ally will they swim across the ocean on Camel with Pea Shooter's and shoulder rockit launchers, really, will all 52 of them make it across?

To believe that these friends of Bush I and II "Terrorists" are so powerful that unpatriotic legislation that removes your rights was in order to protect you from this unseen world power that should force you resign you freedoms in fear in terror,

To believe that Alberto Gonzales should continue to run the InJustice Department after lying to Congress, perjuring himself to Congress, violating the Patriot Act he implemented to spy on American's illegally and attempting to coerce Justice Department senior members at their hospital beds,

To believe that bringing the boys back home from an illegal war of war crimes would somehow be unpatriotic where leaving them in such war makes us all war criminals equal to Nazi's,

To believe that opposing the Decider and his demonic crew is unpatriotic, I quote Theodore Roosevelt "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but morally treasonable to the American public."

To allow the Decider to sign legislation giving him ruling powers of a king, inapposite of Democracy entirely and as show later herein to be almost an identical series of events used by Hitler to illegally seize power of Germany, frightening but true,

To trusting politicians who spin for whoever lines their coffers, however despicable their agenda and allowing guys like Karl Rove and his buddy Abramoff influence our politicians illegally,

To believing that Katrina was not the result of careful planning by these sick demented leaders to wipe the black out of New Orleans, leaving them floating to the ceiling with no help or aid, so as to take the survivors back to Texas ranches for slave labor and stealing their land to build future casino's to further rape people,

To all of the following from an excerpt from

"The scandal sheet ~ Print it out, send it to Harry Reid, or just read it and weep. Here are 34 scandals from the first four years of George W. Bush's presidency -- every one of them worse than Whitewater."

By Peter Dizikes

Keep in mind these are the first four years

1. Memogate: The Senate Computer Theft

The scandal: From 2001 to 2003, Republican staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee illicitly accessed nearly 5,000 computer files containing confidential Democratic strategy memos about President Bush's judicial nominees. The GOP used the memos to shape their own plans and leaked some to the media.

The problem: The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act states it is illegal to obtain confidential information from a government computer.

The outcome: Unresolved. The Justice Department has assigned a prosecutor to the case. The staff member at the heart of the matter, Manuel Miranda, has attempted to brazen it out, filing suit in September 2004 against the DOJ to end the investigation. "A grand jury will indict a ham sandwich," Miranda complained. Some jokes just write themselves.

2. Doctor Detroit: The DOJ's Bungled Terrorism Case

The scandal : The Department of Justice completely botched the nation's first post-9/11 terrorism trial, as seen when the convictions of three Detroit men allegedly linked to al-Qaida were overturned in September 2004. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft had claimed their June 2003 sentencing sent "a clear message" that the government would "detect, disrupt and dismantle the activities of terrorist cells."

The problem: The DOJ's lead prosecutor in the case, Richard Convertino, withheld key information from the defense and distorted supposed pieces of evidence -- like a Las Vegas vacation video purported to be a surveillance tape. But that's not the half of it. Convertino says he was unfairly scapegoated because he testified before the Senate, against DOJ wishes, about terrorist financing. Justice's reconsideration of the case began soon thereafter. Convertino has since sued the DOJ, which has also placed him under investigation.

The outcome: Let's see: Overturned convictions, lawsuits and feuding about a Kafkaesque case. Nobody looks good here.

3. Dark Matter: The Energy Task Force

The scandal: A lawsuit has claimed it is illegal for Dick Cheney to keep the composition of his 2001 energy-policy task force secret. What's the big deal? The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has suggested an explosive aspect of the story, citing a National Security Council memo from February 2001, which "directed the N.S.C. staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the 'melding' of ... 'operational policies towards rogue states,' such as Iraq, and 'actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.'" In short, the task force's activities could shed light on the administration's pre-9/11 Iraq aims.

The problem: The Federal Advisory Committee Act says the government must disclose the work of groups that include non-federal employees; the suit claims energy industry executives were effectively task force members. Oh, and the Bush administration has portrayed the Iraq war as a response to 9/11, not something it was already considering.

The outcome: Unresolved. In June 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back to an appellate court.

4. The Indian Gaming Scandal

The scandal: Potential influence peddling to the tune of $82 million, for starters. Jack Abramoff, a GOP lobbyist and major Bush fundraiser, and Michael Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), received that amount from several Indian tribes, while offering access to lawmakers. For instance, Texas' Tigua tribe, which wanted its closed El Paso casino reopened, gave millions to the pair and $33,000 to Rep. Robert Ney (R-Ohio) in hopes of favorable legislation (Ney came up empty). And get this: The Tiguas were unaware that Abramoff, Scanlon and conservative activist Ralph Reed had earned millions lobbying to have the same casino shut in 2002.

The problem: Federal officials want to know if Abramoff and Scanlon provided real services for the $82 million, and if they broke laws while backing candidates in numerous Indian tribe elections.

The outcome: Everybody into the cesspool! The Senate Indian Affairs Committee and five federal agencies, including the FBI, IRS, and Justice Department, are investigating.

5. Halliburton's No-Bid Bonanza

The scandal: In February 2003, Halliburton received a five-year, $7 billion no-bid contract for services in Iraq.

The problem: The Army Corps of Engineers' top contracting officer, Bunnatine Greenhouse, objected to the deal, saying the contract should be the standard one-year length, and that a Halliburton official should not have been present during the discussions.

The outcome: The FBI is investigating. The $7 billion contract was halved and Halliburton won one of the parts in a public bid. For her troubles, Greenhouse has been forced into whistle-blower protection.

6. Halliburton: Pumping Up Prices

The scandal: In 2003, Halliburton overcharged the army for fuel in Iraq. Specifically, Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root hired a Kuwaiti company, Altanmia, to supply fuel at about twice the going rate, then added a markup, for an overcharge of at least $61 million, according to a December 2003 Pentagon audit.

The problem: That's not the government's $61 million, it's our $61 million.

The outcome: The FBI is investigating.

7. Halliburton's Vanishing Iraq Money

The scandal: In mid-2004, Pentagon auditors determined that $1.8 billion of Halliburton's charges to the government, about 40 percent of the total, had not been adequately documented.

The problem: That's not the government's $1.8 billion, it's our $1.8 billion.

The outcome: The Defense Contract Audit Agency has "strongly" asked the Army to withhold about $60 million a month from its Halliburton payments until the documentation is provided.

8. The Halliburton Bribe-apalooza

The scandal: This may not surprise you, but an international consortium of companies, including Halliburton, is alleged to have paid more than $100 million in bribes to Nigerian officials, from 1995 to 2002, to facilitate a natural-gas-plant deal. (Cheney was Halliburton's CEO from 1995 to 2000.)

The problem: The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials.

The outcome: A veritable coalition of the willing is investigating the deal, including the Justice Department, the SEC, the Nigerian government and a French magistrate. In June, Halliburton fired two implicated executives.

9. Halliburton: One Fine Company

The scandal: In 1998 and 1999, Halliburton counted money recovered from project overruns as revenue, before settling the charges with clients.

The problem: Doing so made the company's income appear larger, but Halliburton did not explain this to investors. The SEC ruled this accounting practice was "materially misleading."

The outcome: In August 2004, Halliburton agreed to pay a $7.5 million fine to settle SEC charges. One Halliburton executive has paid a fine and another is settling civil charges. Now imagine the right-wing rhetoric if, say, Al Gore had once headed a firm fined for fudging income statements.

10. Halliburton's Iran End Run

The scandal: Halliburton may have been doing business with Iran while Cheney was CEO.

The problem: Federal sanctions have banned U.S. companies from dealing directly with Iran. To operate in Iran legally, U.S. companies have been required to set up independent subsidiaries registered abroad. Halliburton thus set up a new entity, Halliburton Products and Services Ltd., to do business in Iran, but while the subsidiary was registered in the Cayman Islands, it may not have had operations totally independent of the parent company.

The outcome: Unresolved. The Treasury Department has referred the case to the U.S. attorney in Houston, who convened a grand jury in July 2004.

11. Money Order: Afghanistan's Missing $700 Million Turns Up in Iraq

The scandal: According to Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack," the Bush administration diverted $700 million in funds from the war in Afghanistan, among other places, to prepare for the Iraq invasion.

The problem: Article I, Section 8, Clause 12 of the U.S. Constitution specifically gives Congress the power "to raise and support armies." And the emergency spending bill passed after Sept. 11, 2001, requires the administration to notify Congress before changing war spending plans. That did not happen.

The outcome: Congress declined to investigate. The administration's main justification for its decision has been to claim the funds were still used for, one might say, Middle East anti-tyrant-related program activities.

12. Iraq: More Loose Change

The scandal: The inspector general of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq released a series of reports in July 2004 finding that a significant portion of CPA assets had gone missing -- 34 percent of the materiel controlled by Kellogg, Brown & Root -- and that the CPA's method of disbursing $600 million in Iraq reconstruction funds "did not establish effective controls and left accountability open to fraud, waste and abuse."

The problem: As much as $50 million of that money was disbursed without proper receipts.

The outcome: The CPA has disbanded, but individual government investigations into the handling of Iraq's reconstruction continue.

13. The Pentagon-Israel Spy Case

The scandal: A Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, may have passed classified United States documents about Iran to Israel, possibly via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a Washington lobbying group.

The problem: To do so could be espionage or could constitute the mishandling of classified documents.

The outcome: A grand jury is investigating. In December 2004, the FBI searched AIPAC's offices. A Senate committee has also been investigating the apparently unauthorized activities of the Near East and South Asia Affairs group in the Pentagon, where Franklin works.

14. Gone to Taiwan

The scandal: Missed this one? A high-ranking State Department official, Donald Keyser, was arrested and charged in September with making a secret trip to Taiwan and was observed by the FBI passing documents to Taiwanese intelligence agents in Washington-area meetings.

The problem: Such unauthorized trips are illegal. And we don't have diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

The outcome: The case is in the courts.

15. Wiretapping the United Nations

The scandal: Before the United Nations' vote on the Iraq war, the United States and Great Britain developed an eavesdropping operation targeting diplomats from several countries.

The problem: U.N. officials say the practice is illegal and undermines honest diplomacy, although some observers claim it is business as usual on East 42nd Street.

The outcome: Little fuss here, but a major British scandal erupted after U.K. intelligence translator Katherine Gun leaked a U.S. National Security Agency memo requesting British help in the spying scheme, in early 2003. Initially charged under Britain's Official Secrets Act for leaking classified information, Gun was cleared in 2004 -- seemingly to avoid hearings questioning the legality of Britain's war participation.

16. The Boeing Boondoggle

The scandal: In 2003, the Air Force contracted with Boeing to lease a fleet of refueling tanker planes at an inflated price: $23 billion.

The problem: The deal was put together by a government procurement official, Darleen Druyun, who promptly joined Boeing. Beats using a headhunter.

The outcome: In November 2003, Boeing fired both Druyun and CFO Michael Sears. In April 2004, Druyun pled guilty to a conspiracy charge in the case. In November 2004, Sears copped to a conflict-of-interest charge, and company CEO Phil Condit resigned. The government is reviewing its need for the tankers.

17. The Medicare Bribe Scandal

The scandal: According to former Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.), on Nov. 21, 2003, with the vote on the administration's Medicare bill hanging in the balance, someone offered to contribute $100,000 to his son's forthcoming congressional campaign, if Smith would support the bill.

The problem: Federal law prohibits the bribery of elected officials.

The outcome: In September 2004, the House Ethics Committee concluded an inquiry by fingering House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), saying he deserved "public admonishment" for offering to endorse Smith's son in return for Smith's vote. DeLay has claimed Smith initiated talks about a quid pro quo. The matter of the $100,000 is unresolved; soon after his original allegations, Smith suddenly claimed he had not been offered any money. Smith's son Brad lost his GOP primary in August 2004.

18. Tom DeLay's PAC Problems

The scandal: One of DeLay's political action committees, Texans for a Republican Majority, apparently reaped illegal corporate contributions for the campaigns of Republicans running for the Texas Legislature in 2002. Given a Republican majority, the Legislature then re-drew Texas' U.S. congressional districts to help the GOP.

The problem: Texas law bans the use of corporate money for political purposes.

The outcome: Unresolved. Three DeLay aides and associates -- Jim Ellis, John Colyandro and Warren RoBold -- were charged in September 2004 with crimes including money laundering and unlawful acceptance of corporate contributions.

19. Tom DeLay's FAA: Following Americans Anywhere

The scandal: In May 2003, DeLay's office persuaded the Federal Aviation Administration to find the plane carrying a Texas Democratic legislator, who was leaving the state in an attempt to thwart the GOP's nearly unprecedented congressional redistricting plan.

The problem: According to the House Ethics Committee, the "invocation of federal executive branch resources in a partisan dispute before a state legislative body" is wrong.

The outcome: In October 2004, the committee rebuked DeLay for his actions.

20. In the Rough: Tom DeLay's Golf Fundraiser

The scandal: DeLay appeared at a golf fundraiser that Westar Energy held for one of his political action committees, Americans for a Republican Majority, while energy legislation was pending in the House.

The problem: It's one of these "appearance of impropriety" situations.

The outcome: The House Ethics Committee tossed the matter into its Oct. 6 rebuke. "Take a lap, Tom."

21. Busy, Busy, Busy in New Hampshire

The scandal: In 2002, with a tight Senate race in New Hampshire, Republican Party officials paid a Virginia-based firm, GOP Marketplace, to enact an Election Day scheme meant to depress Democratic turnout by "jamming" the Democratic Party phone bank with continuous calls for 90 minutes.

The problem: Federal law prohibits the use of telephones to "annoy or harass" anyone.

The outcome: Chuck McGee, the former executive director of the New Hampshire GOP, pleaded guilty in July 2004 to a felony charge, while Allen Raymond, former head of GOP Marketplace, pleaded guilty to a similar charge in June. In December, James Tobin, former New England campaign chairman of Bush-Cheney '04, was indicted for conspiracy in the case.

22. The Medicare Money Scandal

The scandal: Thomas Scully, Medicare's former administrator, supposedly threatened to fire chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster to prevent him from disclosing the true cost of the 2003 Medicare bill.

The problem: Congress voted on the bill believing it would cost $400 billion over 10 years. The program is more likely to cost $550 billion.

The outcome: Scully denies threatening to fire Foster, as Foster has charged, but admits telling Foster to withhold the higher estimate from Congress. In September 2004, the Government Accountability Office recommended Scully return half his salary from 2003. Inevitably, Scully is now a lobbyist for drug companies helped by the bill.

23. The Bogus Medicare "Video News Release"

The scandal: To promote its Medicare bill, the Bush administration produced imitation news-report videos touting the legislation. About 40 television stations aired the videos. More recently, similar videos promoting the administration's education policy have come to light.

The problem: The administration broke two laws: One forbidding the use of federal money for propaganda, and another forbidding the unauthorized use of federal funds.

The outcome: In May 2004, the GAO concluded the administration acted illegally, but the agency lacks enforcement power.

24. Pundits on the Payroll: The Armstrong Williams Case

The scandal: The Department of Education paid conservative commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote its educational law, No Child Left Behind.

The problem: Williams did not disclose that his support was government funded until the deal was exposed in January 2005.

The outcome: The House and FCC are considering inquiries, while Williams' syndicated newspaper column has been terminated.

25. Ground Zero's Unsafe Air

The scandal: Government officials publicly minimized the health risks stemming from the World Trade Center attack. In September 2001, for example, Environmental Protection Agency head Christine Todd Whitman said New York's "air is safe to breathe and [the] water is safe to drink."

The problem: Research showed serious dangers or was incomplete. The EPA used outdated techniques that failed to detect tiny asbestos particles. EPA data also showed high levels of lead and benzene, which causes cancer. A Sierra Club report claims the government ignored alarming data. A GAO report says no adequate study of 9/11's health effects has been organized.

The outcome: The long-term health effects of the disaster will likely not be apparent for years or decades and may never be definitively known. Already, hundreds of 9/11 rescue workers have quit their jobs because of acute illnesses.

26. John Ashcroft's Illegal Campaign Contributions

The scandal: Ashcroft's exploratory committee for his short-lived 2000 presidential bid transferred $110,000 to his unsuccessful 2000 reelection campaign for the Senate.

The problem: The maximum for such a transfer is $10,000.

The outcome: The Federal Election Commission fined Ashcroft's campaign treasurer, Garrett Lott, $37,000 for the transgression.

 27. Intel Inside ... The White House

The scandal: In early 2001, chief White House political strategist Karl Rove held meetings with numerous companies while maintaining six-figure holdings of their stock -- including Intel, whose executives were seeking government approval of a merger. "Washington hadn't seen a clearer example of a conflict of interest in years," wrote Paul Glastris in the Washington Monthly.

The problem: The Code of Federal Regulations says government employees should not participate in matters in which they have a personal financial interest.

The outcome: Then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, spurning precedent, did not refer the case to the Justice Department.

28. Duck! Antonin Scalia's Legal Conflicts

The scandal: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refused to recuse himself from the Cheney energy task force case, despite taking a duck-hunting trip with the vice president after the court agreed to weigh the matter.

The problem: Federal law requires a justice to "disqualify himself from any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned."

The outcome: Scalia stayed on, arguing no conflict existed because Cheney was party to the case in a professional, not personal, capacity. Nothing new for Scalia, who in 2002 was part of a Mississippi redistricting ruling favorable to GOP Rep. Chip Pickering -- son of Judge Charles Pickering, a Scalia turkey-hunting pal. In 2001, Scalia went pheasant hunting with Kansas Gov. Bill Graves when that state had cases pending before the Supreme Court.

29. AWOL

The scandal: George W. Bush, self-described "war president," did not fulfill his National Guard duty, and Bush and his aides have made misleading statements about it. Salon's Eric Boehlert wrote the best recent summary of the issue.

The problem: Military absenteeism is a punishable offense, although Bush received an honorable discharge.

The outcome: No longer a campaign issue. But what was Bush doing in 1972?

30. Iraq: The Case for War

The scandal: Bush and many officials in his administration made false statements about Iraq's military capabilities, in the months before the United States' March 2003 invasion of the country.

The problem: For one thing, it is a crime to lie to Congress, although Bush backers claim the president did not knowingly make false assertions.

The outcome: A war spun out of control with unknowable long-term consequences. The Iraq Survey Group has stopped looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

31. Niger Forgeries: Whodunit?

The scandal: In his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The problem: The statement was untrue. By March 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency showed the claim, that Iraq sought materials from Niger, was based on easily discernible forgeries.

The outcome: The identity of the forger(s) remains under wraps. Journalist Josh Marshall has implied the FBI is oddly uninterested in interviewing Rocco Martino, the former Italian intelligence agent who apparently first shopped the documents in intelligence and journalistic circles and would presumably be able to shed light on their origin.

32. In Plame Sight

The scandal: In July 2003, administration officials disclosed the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative working on counterterrorism efforts, to multiple journalists, and columnist Robert Novak made Plame's identity public. Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had just written a New York Times opinion piece stating he had investigated the Niger uranium-production allegations, at the CIA's behest, and reported them to be untrue, before Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

The problem: Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act it is illegal to disclose, knowingly, the name of an undercover agent.

The outcome: Unresolved. The Justice Department appointed special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to the case in December 2003. While this might seem a simple matter, Fitzgerald could be unable to prove the leakers knew Plame was a covert agent.

33. Abu Ghraib

The scandal: American soldiers physically tortured prisoners in Iraq and kept undocumented "ghost detainees" in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The problem: The United States is party to the Geneva Conventions, which state that "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever."

The outcome: Unresolved. A Pentagon internal inquiry found a lack of oversight at Abu Ghraib, while independent inquiries have linked the events to the administration's desire to use aggressive interrogation methods globally. Notoriously, Gonzales has advocated an approach which "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." More recently, Gonzales issued qualified support for the Geneva Conventions in January 2005 Senate testimony after being nominated for attorney general. Army reservist Charles Graner was convicted in January 2005 for abusing prisoners, while a few other soldiers await trial.

34. Guantanamo Bay Torture?

The scandal: The U.S. military is also alleged to have abused prisoners at the U.S. Navy's base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. FBI agents witnessing interrogations there have reported use of growling dogs to frighten prisoners and the chaining of prisoners in the fetal position while depriving them of food or water for extended periods.

The problem: More potential violations of the Geneva Conventions.

The outcome: An internal military investigation was launched in January 2005.

-----

Other scandals not in the list

35. Patentgate

The scandal: US attorneys from major US law firms were found to be converting their client, Iviewit's intellectual property as their own through falsified patent applications with false declarations of oath, wrong inventors, wrong assignees and missing disclosures for the Iviewit shareholders Intellectual Properties.  Simultaneously, the were found illegally creating companies to harbor stolen Intellectual Properties that had the right stuff in the Intellectual Properties but the companies, while identically named to Iviewit companies are owned by unknown parties.  Further, the attorneys involved were found with a history of patent thefts.

To deflect prosecution, these attorneys violated various public offices, including state Supreme Courts, where it has been speculated that a top down control was necessary to block complaints that may have infiltrated key positions in the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government. 

The problem: Without the sanctity of the Commerce Department, free commerce in America will cease to exist and personal property will be owned by the Decider.

The outcome: Ongoing federal, state and international investigations were begun in 2000 and continue today with the intellectual property having been suspended.  The FBI and US Attorney offices lost case files pertaining to the Iviewit matters and a car bombing attempt on the main inventor's family minivan, elevating the matters to the highest levels in the Justice Department and the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

36. Skull and Bones Influence on the President and Vice President

The scandal: George W. Bush is a third generation Bush to be members in a formerly secret cult that worships the ideology of Nazi Germany, rituals include mutual masturbation in coffins and eating off Nazi flatware.  The members take oath to Skull and Bones above all else and it's agenda of creating an elitist New World Order that thrives on separating the classes, starting class wars, segregation, slavery, world wars for profit, Ebonics (population thinning through the spread of disease, war, etc.) and the control of government for the cult, usurping the rights of the People.  Dick Cheney, although attending Yale was such a big fat loser that despite approximately nine other family members chosen, could not weasel his way in and thus he dropped out of Yale but has become the cults friend through his support of their policies and influence in the government using his political connections to funnel money to their organizations in often illegal ways, ie Halliburton and the Carlyle Group.  Finally, in the last election, John Kerry was also a Skull and Bonehead and thus either way the country voted the boneheads would have had their agenda in the Whitehouse.  This tactic of playing both sides of a ticket has elevated Boners into the highest levels of government.

The Problem: No public servant is to swear false oath to the People as this constitutes treason when the opposing agenda is inapposite the Constitution.

The outcome:  The government has been seized, the Bonehead agenda is ruining and running the country, Ebonics such as New Orleans, War Profiteering War Crimes in Iraq, systematic undermining of the Constitution to remove personal freedoms, illegal legislation to give the President powers for marshal law, concentration camps set up, removal of Habeus Corpus (the first thing Hitler did to seize Germany, staged terror events such as the Trade Center with a forward looking event human torture atrocities, intimidation of politicians and Supreme Court members, hijacking of the Justice Department to use it at the Pleasure of the Decider Boner Bonehead disguised as President.

37. The Federalist Plot

The Scandal:

The Problem:

The Outcome:

38. RNC Missing Emails

The Scandal:  Thousands perhaps millions of emails, circumventing Presidential Record Retention laws and the Hatch Act

The Problem: Email servers set up by the RNC allowed RNC members to set up a back channel for secretive and perhaps subversive activities.  Problem is it's wholly illegal.

The Outcome: Congress subpoenaed the information, they refused, stay tuned...

More from 

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION

Unreported Bush Scandals with Supporting Web Links

August 3, 2004

All The Unreported Bush Scandals

1) Novak-Gate:

It is going on a year now, with little or NO COVERAGE. I suggest The Media CorpSE check out in FindLaw's Cases & Codes Section. Look at Title 50, Chapter 15, Subchapter IV, Section 421 of The United States Code. That Section only deals with the "protection of CIA Agents", so their cover does not get blown by jerks like Novak. Sure sounds like Novak, The White House and the media corpSE could give a damn about that law.

Does Congress remember that THEY passed these laws? Ask yourself HOW FAST would the media and The Republican Congress be all over Clinton IF HIS White House Administration DID THIS to GET BACK AT O'Reilly, Coulter, Limbaugh or Hannity and they had a wife or husband working as a Covert CIA Agent? Yet the media yawns and Novak is still employed by CNN and newspapers to this very day!!

Laws On The Books Against People Like Novak

2) FBI-Ashcroft-Gate:

Sibel Edmonds worked as translator for FBI. She uncovered The FBI's plan to "get more workers" at The FBI after 9/11, by making the people work slowly. You heard me right!!! If you were a conscience worker who did your translation as fast as possible to help get the bastards who bombed us with civil aircraft, your translations would get deleted by your boss. Your boss would then tell you the next day: "Let that be a lesson to you". Translated, take long coffee and lunch breaks and "translation work be damn".

Edmonds also told Congress about The FBI's very poor and sloppy background checks for new workers. New translators got into the FBI who were members of "the other side". There are words for this, and it is known as ENEMIES doing ESPIONAGE.

She complained to Senators Leahy and Grassley, who had the information about Sibel on their computers and papers in their offices. Both Senators are on the committee, which oversees The FBI. When Sibel got fired from the FBI for complaining, she took The FBI to court. Ashcroft re-classified all the documents that Leahy and Grassley had as Classified Material and the information was promptly removed from their computers and offices.

Ashcroft has just had the case thrown out by a Republican Judge, and all the documents are still classified. This is known, for you in the media corpSE, as a COVER-UP!!

The 9/11 Commission Report only has Sibel Edmonds in their report in footnote number 25. Check out all stories and interviews regarding this and start covering the real news.

Do a Google search on "Sibel Edmonds" and look at all your hits. Then go to any Major Newspaper website around the country and do the same search of the newspaper's website. Likewise, go to the so-called News Media corpSE and check out how many stories they have on "Sibel Edmonds". Most of them are for the web and un-reported on television because Scott Peterson and Kobe Bryant are "more important".

60 Minutes Transcript - Lost In Translation

FBI Informant Sibel Edmonds Articles

Whistleblowers Who Tried To Prevent 9/11

Sibel Edmonds Calls 9/11 Investigation Inadequate

3) NO WMD-Gate: Bush thinks he is funny by making a joke about NO WMD by looking under his desk and says "Nope, No WMD Under Here Either" at this year's Correspondence Dinner. Tim Russert and many other journalists thought it was a "good joke".

How many soldiers has BUSH killed with LIES? How many families have had to attend unwanted funerals? The Bush-Reporters at FOX must have been laughing their stitches out, at his NO WMD HERE jokes.

Gee, I wonder if Bush would give Lila, who lost her son in the F-9/11 movie, a tape of his Correspondence Dinner laughing show?

No WMD Joke Backfires On Bush

Media Reacts To Bush's No WMD Joke

4) Iran-Code-GATE: Chalabi gets told that The United States has broken "Iran's Secret Code". So much for the "secret". Chalabi pays us back by telling Iran. Slow, investigations and NO REPORTING by The Media CorpSE continue through today.

I'm putting all my money on Iran, as our next NON-SCRUTINIZED WAR by BOTH Reporters and Republicans - and that Bush will make sick jokes about that war after thousands are killed.

Why should Bush care? It's not HIS DAUGHTERS on the FRONT LINES with an M-16 in their hands, firing at the enemy and getting blown-up by hidden bombs in the roadway.

Iraq's Chalabi Tells Iran That US Broke Their Code

What Really Happen to Chalabi?

5) Nuke-Gate: There have been THREE (3) LEAKS of Classified Information from Los Alamos, in New Mexico, in the past EIGHT (8) MONTHS!!!

For those of you who are young or do not follow the news or history, Los Alamos is where they do Atomic Research and made two small weapons, also known as Atomic Bombs, that President Harry Truman dropped on Japan to end WWII. Nothing To PANIC About!!!

And Bush is worrying about "Nuclear Problems" with Iraq, Iran and Korea? Sounds like Bush, The Media CorpSE and The Voters had better get their act together, and start worrying about the leakers within our OWN country.

You don't think that Al-Quida have gotten into Los Alamos, do you? What the hell, if they could infiltrate The FBI, what is stopping them from Los Alamos? Perhaps this is why Ridge DID NOT raise the "color level", but he did make a speech that sounded like we were in trouble a few weeks ago. You remember don't you? It was just as Kerry picked Edwards for his running mate. Coincidence?

So lets see here. We have a CIA Agent OUTED by The White House via Novak. Then Al-Quida INFILTRATES The FBI and Ashcroft hushed up the Sibel Edmonds story. Then someone tells Chalabi that we broke Iran's code and Chalabi tells Iran. And now, we have nuke secrets out there somewhere, three times in eight months.

I'm "not worried" about the way Bush is handling our "top-secrets". Are You??

Computerworld Reports on Third Security Breach at Los Alamos in Eight Months

6) Anthrax-Gate: It was back in 2001 that we had the anthrax attacks. Yet, in 2004, the person accused, Steven Hatfill, still has not had his fair trial.

Is my memory slipping, or has Ashcroft ransacked the "Due Process Under The Law" that you are supposed to have, when you are accused and arrested?

Does this mean that YOU could be next to get thrown in jail without "due process" by Johnny?

Steven Hatfill Still Not Tried For Anthrax Charges by Ashcroft in 2001

7) Forgotten-Gate: Say the name "bin Laden" to Bush, and he would say, "bin Laden "WHO"?

9/11 Commission Says No Link Between Iraq and Al Quida

I seem to remember this guy who claims to be our President, once saying the following sentence about Bin Laden: "And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive".

Bush Makes "Dead or Alive" Statement on 9/17/2001

So instead we go after the guy in Iraq "who tried to kill my dad".

Saddam Tried To Kill My Daddie

Now Pakistan has been ORDERED by BUSH to catch bin Laden, during the summer of 2004. Why now? Why, THREE YEARS after 9/11, would Bush suddenly want to go after bin Laden this year - BY THE END OF SUMMER?

Bush Orders Bin Laden Captured by Election

Back when Clinton was facing Impeachment (for sex) and he went after Bin Laden, we had the Media CorpSE and Every Republicans in Congress all yelling about "WAG THE DOG". Why aren't the Republicans and lame media corpSE all over this "sudden change of direction" in Bush's war plan?

8) Voter-Purge-Gate: Here we go again. States are purging "felons" off the voter lists again. Problem is many of the voters, mostly blacks, are NOT felons. One "FUTURE FELON" has a crime date in January 30, 2007!!! What's Wrong With This Picture??

Try another election gimmick Bush; and there is going to be an outbreak of WAR, here on the streets in The United States. It will make the riots of 1968's Democratic Convention and the Kent State protest on May 1-4, 1970, for those of you who can remember back then, look like they were tame, quiet and peaceful.

Florida will become the new "Kent State" or "Vietnam War Riots" in America's history books if "Innocent" or "Future Crime" voting purges occur in Florida again.

Thank goodness for investigative reporters Greg Palast and Fintan Dunne. America won't carry their articles. I wonder why?

Future Felon Purged off Florida Voting List

Greg Palast Articles on The Theft of A Presidency

The Protest At Kent State on May 1-4, 1970

Protests and Uproar of Vietnam War

9) Judicial-Gate: Republicans break into Democratic Judiciary Office / Computer for over a year, and find out how Senator Leahy and Democrats are going to fight Bush Judicial Nominations.

Media Replies with a big yawn. It's must be their addiction to sleeping pills.

Republicans Infiltrate Democratic Judicial Senate Files For A Year

Republican Judicial Committee Memo Gate

10) Halliburton-Gate: Name says it all and it would take a "War and Peace" book to write to you about all of it. Media skims over and Halliburton on its Cheney stories, and then it's onto more important stories about Kobe Bryant and Scott Peterson. I know the American Press is LAME when I have to go to The Moscow Times (2nd link) to get current articles on Bush Scandals.

Independent Media Looks At Cheney Scandals

Cheney, Halliburton and His Iraq Deals

Halliburton Faces Trial For Iran Links

11) Religion Gate: Republicans cross the "Church vs State" boundaries by signing up voters in church.

And the "UNbiased" media is "worried" about a "Catholic" becoming President again?

Push for Bush Voter Registration in Churches Could Cost it Tax Breaks

12) Compassionate-Gate: Republican Mouthpiece LimBORE says, "the soldiers were just blowing off some steam", when the soldiers were taking pics of nude Iraq people.

Then The Vice-President then tells Senator Leahy, in The Senate Chamber to "F Himself".

Bush then sends soldiers off into battle, and proceeds to cut their pay and VA Benefits. I guess that takes care of the "compassionate side" within The Republican Party.

Potty Mouth Cheney

Thanks for Serving Because I'm Slashing Your Benefits

13) Conservative-Gate: Last time I knew what Conservatives stood for, it meant being a tightwad with money.

So what has this Republican White House, Republican House and Republican Senate given to us with their tightwad spending habits?

The "Conservative" Republicans have given us a Two-Trillion Dollar Deficit. It sure looks like the Republican media corpSE got their big tax-cuts and could give a damn about reporting how LARGE the deficit has grown under Bush and The Republicans.

All of "Liberal", Democratic President Clinton Surplus went right down the drain. It could have been used on the military, education and health benefits but people like Cheney needed their $800,000 tax cut.

The Republican Spending Explosion

The Amazing Disappearing Budget Surplus

If Bush Is Elected, All Agencies Will Get Budget Cuts

More From

The Carpetbagger, May 18, 2004: Let's see, I can think of about a dozen, but I'm sure I'm missing a few. In no particular order...

Cheney's secretive Energy Task Force was investigated by the GAO and the case is currently pending at the Supreme Court.

Bush's Medicare scam and the circumstances that led the administration to lie to Congress about the cost of the legislation is under investigation by the HHS inspector general's office.

The massive intelligence failure that led Bush to lie to the world about the Iraqi threat is under investigation by a congressionally-authorized independent commission (which Bush fought the creation of).

Bribes offered on the House floor to Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) in exchange for his vote on Bush's Medicare plan are under investigation by the House Ethics Committee and the Justice Department.

Attorney General John Ashcroft was under investigation by the Federal Election Commission for violating campaign finance laws in 2000, and the FEC concluded that Ashcroft accepted $110,000 in illegal contributions.

An investigation into House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's criminal fundraising schemes in Texas -- which allegedly used corporate funds to help state GOP lawmakers -- is already before a Texas grand jury.

Republican staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee were investigated for stealing thousands of confidential memos from Dem computers, a matter that has now been referred to the Justice Department for a possible criminal probe.

Republican Connecticut Gov. John Rowland is under a criminal investigation (and an impeachment investigation) after he lied about prominent state contractors and several government aides paying for refurbishments to his lake-front cottage.

Former Rep. Bill Janklow (R-S.D.) was under investigation for vehicular manslaughter, a crime for which he was later convicted.

The Pentagon launched a formal investigation into well-armed evangelist and three-star General William "Jerry" Boykin, Bush's pick for deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and his record of extreme religious rhetoric.

The circumstances that led to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 are under investigation by a congressionally-authorized independent commission (which, again, Bush fought the creation of and then later resisted cooperating with).

And honorable mentions should go, of course, to investigations into Halliburton (Dick Cheney's former company) and Enron (George Bush's biggest corporate supporter).

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was investigated for violating state campaign finance laws, a charge for which he was later found guilty by a state judge. The state has a $100,000 cap on candidate loans; Schwarzenegger loaned himself over $4 million in the closing days of his campaign. (Updated 3/21/04, thanks to reader Josh C. for the tip.)

The forged documents that led Bush to inaccurately claim that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger are under investigation by a Senate committee and the FBI. (Updated 3/21/04, thanks to reader N.Z. for the tip.)

John Korsmo, Bush's choice to chair the Federal Housing Finance Board, is the target of an ongoing Justice Department criminal probe related to his political fundraising activities and their subsequent cover-up. The scandal cost Korsmo his career; he was forced to resign from his position last week. (Updated 3/21/04, thanks to reader R.G. for the tip.)

The Texas GOP's decision to seek assistance from the FAA to track down Democratic lawmakers fleeing the state to deny a legislative quorum was the subject of two formal inquiries -- one from the U.S. Department of Transportation, the other from the Department of Homeland Security. (Updated 3/21/04, thanks to reader Joe C. for the tip.)

* The General Accounting Office is investigating the legality of White House "video news releases" -- news-like proganda paid for with tax dollars -- which contain highly questionable claims about the alleged benefits of Bush's Medicare plan. (Updated 3/25/04, thanks to reader K.L. for the tip.)

* The Treasury Department's inspector general's office has launched a "preliminary" investigation into whether officials were misused to calculate data for GOP talking points on John Kerry's tax proposals. (Updated 4/7/04)

* The Federal Election Commission investigated the National Republican Congressional Committee and determined that the GOP illegally transferred donations to outside independent groups for assistance in the 2000 campaign. The NRCC was fined $280,000. (Updated 4/9/04)

Best List Yet but it's long

Bush Scandals List: http://www.netrootsmass.net/Hugh/Bush_list.html
updated 8/16/07, recent changes in red. please contact us with corrections and additions.

INTRODUCTION: George Bush, the Connecticut cowboy, the good old boy from Yale is a man of mediocre intelligence, little imagination, and great stubbornness and vindictiveness. He may be the Decider but his handlers have long known how to manipulate him. The key is to hook him with short, simple sells. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice know that once he has consulted his gut and perhaps his higher father his decision is forever. So whoever gets to him first is likely to carry the day because he doesn't like to be challenged and is, quite simply, too lazy to change his mind. The Bubble is a natural consequence of this decision making process where logic, reason, and facts have little or no role.

....Bush's Presidency began in the shadow of a contested and likely stolen election and promised to be unsuccessful in a largely forgettable and unremarkable way. 911 changed all that and transformed a plodding, and essentially AWOL one termer into an accidental hero. Enormous power flowed to his office but Bush had no idea how to use it. He liked to campaign, not govern. In those around him, he prized loyalty over competence and honesty. A believer in the notion of "to the victor go the spoils," he was the perfect mark for every conniver, bumbler, bungler, hack, hanger on, and would be crony that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and their friends could find. In the normal course of things, this would have spelled failure. Post-911, it was catastrophic.

....At this critical juncture in our history we needed an adult but got an adolescent. Instead of responsibility, we got a truant. In place of flexibility we got obduracy. In the face of great and complex challenges, we got strawmen, a black and white universe, my way or the highway, regurgitated stump speeches, and a steadfast refusal to compromise not just with opponents but with reality.
 

....What all this comes down to is that George Bush should never have become our President. He is not just a bad President but the worst one we could have had, the worst our country has ever seen. This is a judgment that many Americans have come to but which our political establishment and media, even after 6 years, have yet to acknowledge, accept, and act on. This is the tragedy and crime of our times.

1. Walter Reed outpatient treatment, poor living conditions, undelivered mail, lack of caseworkers to oversee and facilitate patient care for amputees, brain injured, and psychologically disabled veterans; Walter Reed is not the only military hospital about which questions have been raised; also out there the underfunding of the VA.

....The problems at Walter Reed came to the public's attention through a series of articles by Dana Priest beginning February 18, 2007. Following them, Gen. George Weightman who ran Walter Reed for 6 months resigned March 1, followed by the forced resignation of Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey the next day. Weightman's boss Army Surgeon General Gen. Kevin "I don't do barracks inspections at Walter Reed" Kiley who lived across from the notorious Building 18 and who had run the hospital from 2002-2004 lasted one day as the new head of Walter Reed before he was removed. He resigned from the Army on March 12.

....One source of the difficulties at Walter Reed was the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) decision on August 25, 2005 to close Walter Reed. Planned renovations were canceled. Another was the privatizing of support services at the hospital. The workforce dropped from 350 experienced professionals to 50 who were not and the contract was given to IAP. IAP began work at Walter Reed in 2003. In 2004, IAP lobbied successfully against an Army recommendation not to privatize the workforce. The OMB reversed the Army finding and the services contract was given to IAP in January 2006 although its implementation was delayed a year. IAP is run by two former KBR executives and had a well connected board of directors as well as being owned by a powerful holding company the Cerberus hedge fund.

....However, the generally low priority given to ongoing patient care for wounded soldiers was probably the single greatest reason for the woes at Walter Reed. It bears remembering that there were problems noted as early as 2004 and certainly by 2005 and that Walter Reed is located in the nation's capital minutes from the White House, the Congress, and the offices of major media outlets. Washington didn't know about Walter Reed because it didn't want to know.

2. Firing of US attorneys. Most of the country's 93 US attorneys are usually replaced within the first 2 years of a new administration and this is what happened when Bush came into office in 2001. US attorneys are political appointees and are chosen to reflect the policy priorities of a President. Still their primary job is to uphold the law, and the law is not supposed to be partisan. Karl Rove, of course, had other ideas. He believes that government should be politicized and populated with compliant partisan hacks loyal to him and his.

....The plan was to create a list of political hires and fires of US attorneys under the direction of the White House (i.e. Rove and Harriet Miers) which Gonzales (and Bush) would then dutifully sign off on. There were two components. First, on February 7, 2006, regulations were published giving Attorney General Alberto Gonzales the power to hire and fire all non-civil service employees of the Justice Department (DOJ). On March 1, 2006, Gonzales signed an order delegating this power (subject to his nominal final approval) to two fairly junior and inexperienced staffers: Monica "Loyalty oaths" Goodling his senior counselor and liaison with the White House and his Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson. Second, sometime late in 2005 (shortly before the conference report for the Patriot Act Extension was filed on December 8, 2005), language originating at the DOJ was surreptitiously inserted into the act by Brett Tolman which allowed Gonzales to make indefinite interim US attorney appointments without Senate approval. The conference report was passed and became law on March 9, 2006. So again, the two parts were first to set up a system where Rove could control the hiring and firing of US attorneys and second to bypass the Senate confirmation process which might interfere with the first part.

....On December 7, 2006, eight US attorneys were notified that they would be fired. Most came from swing states. Most were considered not to have aggressively enough prosecuted Democrats or voter fraud cases in the run up to November 2006 elections, the idea being that such prosecutions would have helped Republicans in close elections. Worse some were investigating and had even prosecuted prominent Republicans. And then there were those partisan hacks waiting in the wings to replace them.

1. Carol Lam, Southern California, convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham and indicted the former No. 3 at the CIA Dusty Foggo.

2. H. E. Cummins III, Eastern Arkansas, had been asked to investigate the Republican Governor in the neighboring state of Missouri. He announced the investigation finished in October 2006 a month before the election but was fired anyway to make way for Timothy Griffin, an aide to Karl Rove who had been the principal opposition researcher in the Bush 2004 campaign.

3. David Iglesias, New Mexico, angered Republican Senator Pete Domenici and Representative Heather Wilson when he refused to push for indictments of Democratic officials before the election after they inappropriately contacted him.

4. Daniel Bogden, Nevada, similarly was replaced by Brett Tolman who was crucial to bypassing Senate scrutiny of these appointments.

5. Paul K. Charlton, Arizona, was investigating Republican Representative Rick Renzi for corruption.

6. John McKay, Western Washington, angered state Republicans for not creating voter fraud cases in the 2004 Governor's race which Democrat Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes.

7. Margaret Chiara, Western Michigan. It is not clear why she was fired. She was on the Native American Issues Subcommittee (NAIS) of US attorneys. It may have been to make way for Russell Stoddard who had been languishing out in Guam as First Assistant Attorney after Frederick Black got demoted for investigating Abramoff's activities in the North Marianas.

8. Kevin V. Ryan, Northern California, is the only one of the 8 who deserved to be on the list because he did run his office poorly. DOJ actually wanted to keep him on but a federal judge forced the issue and his name was added to the list.

....As they say, it is not the crime but the coverup. Gonzales has given so many different and contradictory stories about the firings that it is hard to keep up and then there is his memory. In his Senate testimony of April 19, 2007, he answered he couldn't remember by some counts 71 times. He didn't know who had called for such a list. He couldn't remember having been very involved in the process. He even forgot to mention the March 1, 2006 order in his testimony. In fact, he knew very little about what were major decisions at the department he supposedly ran but, despite this, he did know there was nothing improper in any of it. Testifying in the House on May 10, 2007, his memory and his believability were little improved. Kyle Sampson too had memory problems but did contradict Gonzales' claim that he had not been involved. For his part, Sampson described himself as just the guy that others dropped their files off to and his contribution to the process was to keep them in his desk drawer. Initially, Monica Goodling took an indefinite leave of absence, then resigned, then said she would take the 5th in any Congressional testimony. On May 23, 2007, after a grant of immunity she testified that Paul McNulty the Deputy Attorney General was more aware of events surrounding the firings (although this is far from clear), that she had crossed the line (i.e. broken the law) in asking career DOJ hires about their political affiliations, that Gonzales' statements were inaccurate (i.e. he lied), and that Gonzales had sought to harmonize their stories (i.e. obstruct justice). Goodling, like Sampson, tried to portray herself as a bit player despite Gonzales' extraordinary grant of authority to them both. On June 21, 2007, Paul McNulty testified before the Congress and basically stonewalled, saying that he was out of the loop, that he didn't know who created the firing list, that there was no problem at the DOJ, and that there was no contradiction between his testimony and that of anyone else, including Monica Goodling. On July 11, 2007, Sara Taylor who left her post of White House political director in May randomly invoked Executive privilege and otherwise and like so many others had a bad memory. She did state that she had had no dealings with Bush concerning the firings. Along with her selective use of Executive privilege, this contention further undermined the claim that an Executive privilege was involved and left the possibility of a contempt citation. On July 12, 2007, former White House counsel Harriet Miers refused to appear pursuant to a House Judiciary Committee subpoena, leaving her open to contempt proceedings as well.

....From this use of Executive privilege, it is clear that the White House, and more specifically Karl Rove, was involved in the firings and was, in fact, calling the shots in this affair, and that those at Justice, including the Attorney General, were just the eager, if dim, facilitators of it.

....In addition to the Sampson and Goodling resignations, Michael Battle Director of the Executive Office for US Attorneys (EOUSA) who informed the US attorneys of their firing left the DOJ on March 16, 2007. Paul McNulty the No. 2 at the DOJ and Deputy Attorney General announced his resignation on May 14, 2007 to become effective later in the summer. Although left out of the loop on the details of the firings and giving false Congressional as a result for which he apologized, McNulty did approve the firings and through his Chief of Staff Michael Elston warned several of those fired to stay quiet about them. Elston announced his resignation on June 15, 2007. The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) informed the Senate in June 2007 that it was investigating Goodling's claim that Gonzales had tried to tamper with her testimony.

....Congress intervened and changed the relevant provision of the Patriot Act to re-instate the Senate's role in confirming US attorneys (May 22, 2007). This was signed into law June 14, 2007. Provocatively, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales continued to make interim appointments right up to the Presidential signing.

3. Plamegate. Scooter Libby Chief of Staff to the Vice President was convicted on March 6, 2007 on two counts of perjury before the Grand Jury and one count each of obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI. Placing political payback (against an individual and an agency) above national security, the Vice President's office orchestrated the outing of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame, her cover company Brewster Jennings, other agents which had used this same cover, and her contacts. All this was done in retaliation for an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003 written by her husband ambassador Joe Wilson. In it, he publicly debunked the "16 words" in Bush's January 28, 2003 State of the Union which claimed that Saddam Hussein had sought to obtain uranium from Africa (Niger). This undercut the argument that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat and showed that the Bush Administration had known this was so in advance of the war. Wilson had been sent to Niger to investigate this charge in February 2002 at the request of the CIA and had reported nearly a year before its use in the SOTU that it was false. After several attempts by among others Karl Rove to pitch Plame's identity to the media, on July 14, 2003, Valerie Plame was outed in a column by Robert Novak In his closing argument at the Libby trial, Patrick Fitzgerald detailed Cheney's guiding hand in the conspiracy behind the outing and spoke of a "cloud" over the Vice President. That cloud remains.

....On June 5, 2007, Scooter Libby received a preliminary sentence of 30-month term in federal prison, with a 2-year term of supervised release following the completion of that sentence, a $250,000 fine, and a requirement of 400 hours of community service. This was confirmed June 14 and bail during appeal was denied. Scooter's defense solicited letters on his behalf from Washington's conservative elite. These praised his legal expertise and national security credentials and were likely counterproductive since they made clear he was well aware of the legal ramifications of lying to a grand jury and the security implications of outing a CIA agent. A group of conservative attorneys led by Robert Bork also filed an unsuccessful, last minute amicus brief questioning the legitimacy of Patrick Fitzgerald's appointment as prosecutor. It called the appointment a "close" question although its rationale depended upon a lone Supreme Court dissent in a case that was not closely decided and its effect would be to prevent independent investigations of high US officials. On July 2, 2007, a three judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit unanimously denied Libby's appeal. Hours later George Bush commuted Libby's sentence eliminating any jail time. This is an Administration that believes it is outside the law and acts accordingly. It is not so much that they have contempt for the law. Rather they have contempt for us. The cloud that was over Cheney now covers Bush as well.
....A civil suit filed by Valerie Plame was dismissed on July 19, 2007 by judge John D. Bates who ruled that, while Plame's complaint had merit, the court did not have jurisdiction.

4. Iraq: axis of evil, lack of preparation for occupation, looting, including the National Museum, too few troops, lack of training, lack of equipment, lack of securing loose Iraqi munitions, disbanding the Iraqi army, banning the Baathists, the CPA, cronyism, Paul Bremer, losing tons of money literally, lack of international inclusion in reconstruction and security, weak Constitution, formation of sectarian parties, weak government, denial of actual conditions in Iraq, for example, its civil war, ignoring 4 years of failed policies and the basic proposal of the Iraq Study Group to withdraw, escalating instead, continuing lack of any discernible mission.

5. Afghanistan, transferring resources to Iraq before the job was finished, the results: a resurgent Taliban, continuing warlordism, and exploding opium production.

6. Iran and saber rattling, axis of evil, lack of engagement, refusal to talk to, addressing the nuclear issue through threats, clumsy attempts to blame Iran for the debacle in Iraq and a failure to recognize their very real interests there.

7. North Korea, axis of evil, ditching the 1994 agreement and freezing of bank accounts because of dubious uranium program, the plutonium program which led to a fizzled first nuclear test, and something like a return to the 1994 agreement.

8. Osama bin Laden, where are you? The blown opportunity at Tora Bora. Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the roles of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in terrorism. Pakistan's intelligence service the ISI created the Taliban. The government of Pervez Musharraf continues to give it safe haven in Pakistan and its efforts against al Qaeda in Pakistan which do occur are limited and often timed to the visits of American dignitaries. The Saudis for their part fund radical madrassas throughout the Moslem world and have a domestic educational system run by the most extreme of their homegrown extremists. Saudi and Gulf oil dollars find their way to many terrorist groups as well as the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.

9. Civilian contractors; also no bid contracts; in Iraq Halliburton tainted food and water, overpriced gas; Blackwater use of private security contractors, what used to be called mercenaries, with little or no accountability.

10. The Military Commissions Act: torture, indefinite detention, the end of habeas corpus, and kangaroo courts. One of the last acts of the Congress before the November 2006 elections, it passed the Senate on September 28 and the House the next day and was signed into law by Bush on October.

17. The short story on this is that, pre-election, the Republicans pushed it and the Democrats caved on it. As bad as the military commissions envisioned in the act are, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) which designate who is to be tried are even worse. They were complete shams. Decisions were made on the flimsiest and most general information without challenge or taking into account the methods (torture) used to obtain it. Detainees lacked effective legal representation, and the CSRTs did not come close to meeting minimal standards of judicial process, even a preliminary one. To top it off, as later military judges have found, the CSRTs designated detainees "enemy combatants" which does not meet the Military Commissions Act standard of "unlawful enemy combatants" vitiating their findings to date. Even when they make up the rules they can't get it right.

....On July 20, 2007, a three judge panel of the DC Circuit in Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. US rejected parts of the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) of 2005 asserting that it will expect to examine all information bearing on a detainee's case and not just what the government used in deciding to hold a detainee. SCOTUS on June 29, 2007 changed its mind and decided to take a look at these cases in the fall, especially in light of what the Circuit Court might decide.

11. Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the destruction of New Orleans, FEMA and "Heck of a job, Brownie," lack of preparation, lack of emergency aid, slowness of reconstruction, Bush ignores for days then gives address from Jackson Square in New Orleans promising aid which never comes or much of which goes to politically connected outstate no bid contractors, disparity between response to Louisiana and Republican Trent Lott's Mississippi; Bush refuses to waive 10% state match for federal funds (waived in many previous disasters) increasing the bureaucratic paperwork, reducing aid to affected areas, and further slowing and complicating rebuilding.

12. Bush authorized warrantless NSA wiretapping in October 2001. Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) a warrant would be needed from the FISA court (federal judges entrusted with these decisions in addition to their regular jobs) for domestic to international telephone or internet communication. The bar for such a warrant is extraordinarily low, has almost never been denied, and can be granted up to 3 days after the surveillance as begun (in order to give maximum flexibility in emergency situations). This is in contrast to international to international communications which have always been considered legitimate targets for US intelligence organizations and require no warrant. The Bush program acquired its legal basis from a John Yoo memo originating in the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It went much further than cutting FISA out of the loop and probably included surveillance of not just domestic to international communication but also domestic to domestic surveillance of any communication with the original domestic participant. It is conceivable that this continued to those domestic contacts and then to their contacts in ever expanding (and less relevant) circles of surveillance. In such a scenario the number of surveilled increases exponentially and perhaps explains the rumors of data mining since such techniques would be needed to get some kind of a handle on such a mammoth undertaking. Another controversial aspect of the program is that it might be a justification to surveille reporters and politicians, especially opposition politicians.

....In any case in March 2004, the OLC under its new head Jack Goldsmith a defense oriented conservative rejected Yoo's reasoning and reversed its position on the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Deputy Attorney General James Comey both conservatives and Bush appointees accepted this finding. Then Ashcroft came down with acute gallstone pancreatitis and transferred his powers to his deputy Comey who became Acting Attorney General. In a scheme apparently orchestrated by Vice President Cheney, Bush called Mrs. Ashcroft and Cheney "on the President's behalf" ordered then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card to go to the hospital and get the ailing and doped up Ashcroft to sign off on the surveillance program. Mrs. Ashcroft informed her husband's Chief of Staff David Ayers about the impending visit and he contacted Comey. Comey in turn contacted FBI Director Robert Mueller to order the FBI agents guarding Ashcroft to remain in his room (as witnesses) and raced to the hospital and Ashcroft's room in the ICU. This set the scene for the now famous March 10, 2004 hospital room confrontation where Gonzales and Card ignoring Comey tried to get Ashcroft's signature. Ashcroft was, however, lucid enough to refuse to sign and to point out the obvious: that he did not have the power to do so since Comey was the Acting Attorney General. Despite the refusal by the DOJ to vouch for the program's legality, Bush re-authorized it anyway. A threat by Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller to resign did, however, result in changes to the program. The OLC came up with a narrower justification under the AUMF for a more limited program which became the TSP (Terrorist Surveillance Program). It should be noted that this program in all of its manifestations and despite its various justifications has been illegal on its face since its inception.

....The program became public when the New York Times reported on it in December 2005. In 2006 various unsuccessful attempts were made to accommodate the program. This included the infamous attempted "compromise" by Arlen Specter to legalize its worst excesses and retroactively amnesty any illegalities. Under mounting pressure and with a new Democratic Congress, Alberto Gonzales announced on January 18, 2007, a "deal" with the FISA court which would put the program under its supervision. Gonzales maintained, however, that Bush still had Article II power to go outside the court if he wanted to.

....On July 24, 2007, Gonzales testified under oath before Senate Judiciary Committee that before going to the hospital to see Ashcroft he had met with a bipartisan group of Congressional leaders overseeing intelligence matters (the Gang of 8) and that they had approved the predecessor to the TSP. Several of the Democratic members of the Gang of 8 denied that such approval was ever given. Additionally, Gonzales asserted that the program discussed was not the TSP but another program. Both General Hayden then head of the NSA and John Negroponte then DNI have indicated that this was precisely the program discussed albeit in its unmodified form. Finally, Gonzales maintained in his testimony that there had been no serious disagreement about the program despite the objections from the DOJ. Along with his constantly changing testimony concerning the US Attorney firings, this discrepancy led four Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 26, 2007 to ask Solicitor General Paul Clement (in his role of Acting Attorney General for matters in which Gonzales has recused himself) to name a special prosecutor to determine whether Gonzales has obstructed justice, perjured himself, and made false statements.

....Despite previous abuses, April 10, 2007 intelligence czar DNI John McConnell proposes allowing NSA to conduct domestic surveillance of foreign nationals completely outside of FISA, extend from 3 days to one week surveillance without seeking FISA permission "in emergency situations," immunize telecoms, and extend FISA warrants from 120 days to one year.

....On August 5, 2007, Bush signed into law a 6 month revision of FISA which would allow warrantless wiretapping of non-American individuals "reasonably" thought to be outside the US and incidentally of US citizens as long as these are not the primary targets of surveillance. The Attorney General would oversee that the program was properly carried out. In effect, this is a backdoor way to surveille Americans without a warrant, supervised by the thoroughly untrustworthy and eminently impeachable Alberto Gonzales. The bill written by the Republicans was raised at the last minute as lawmakers were on their way out of town for the August recess and would not have come to a vote and won passage except for the parliamentary machinations of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. It represents another failure of Democrats to stand up to a deeply unpopular President and oppose his power grabs.

13. SWIFT surveillance of international financial transactions.

14. Black prisons and extraordinary rendition to facilitate interrogation by torture.

....Khalid El-Masri a German citizen was detained by Macedonian police in late 2003. His name was similar to the alleged mentor of the al Qaeda Hamburg cell (of which two of the 911 pilots Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi as well as Ramzi Binalshibh were members). He was held for 3 weeks and then released. Although the CIA knew that this El-Masri was not the one they were looking for, they kidnapped him and took him to Afghanistan where he was interrogated and beaten for months. Eventually, on May 28, 2004, after two orders from then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and being made to promise never to talk about what happened, El-Masri was dumped at night on a road in Albania. On December 6, 2005, the ACLU filed suit on his behalf in federal court. On May 18, 2006, Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis III dismissed the case accepting the government's contention that a suit into Masri's illegal detention would compromise national security. The dismissal was upheld by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals on March 2, 2007. On January 31, 2007, a German prosecutor issued warrants for 13 people suspected of participation in the kidnapping. For his part, since his release, El-Masri has had a troubled history. On May 17, 2007, after an argument with clerks about a defective iPod, he set fire to the store and burned it down.

....Meanwhile on February 17, 2003, the CIA kidnapped a cleric Abu Omar in Milan and rendered him to Egypt where he was held and tortured. In December 2005, an Italian court issued arrest warrants for 22 CIA agents. Abu Omar was released early in 2007.

....Several European countries are looking into the rendition programs. These efforts are complicated by US stonewalling and the complicity of their own intelligence services.

....As for black prisons, these were created to hold high value ghost detainees up to one hundred in number beyond the oversight of the judiciary and Congress, essentially so that they could be tortured. 14 of these, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were eventually transferred to Guantanamo. In Europe, Poland and Romania were rumored to be sites of the prisons. US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan held others. The remainder were scattered throughout the world in complicit countries and on other US bases. Although there had been previous revelations, the story broke officially in a Dana Priest Washington Post report of November 2, 2005. President Bush acknowledged their existence nearly a year later on September 6, 2006.

....The purpose of both rendition and black prisons was to gain actionable intelligence, an obsession in the Bush Administration. In its pursuit, they stooped to torture and bartered our image as a champion of human rights for a stack of unreliable information. It is an exchange that is impossible to justify.

15. Homeland Security: white elephant (organization), black hole (money), Tom Ridge and threat levels, Michael Chertoff and general incompetence.

....As of May 1, 2007 at DHS, under Chertoff's direction, there were 138 vacancies and another 92 currently being recruited among the department's top 575 positions. Most of these were in the department's policy, legal and intelligence sections, immigration agencies, FEMA, and the Coast Guard. Luckily, nothing important.

16. K Street Lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, North Marianas, removal of investigating US attorney Frederick Black (Guam), Gale Norton and Steven Griles at Interior, go betweens Italia Federici for Norton and Susan Ralston for Rove, tribal casinos; conviction of Rep. Bob "Freedom Fries" Ney (R-OH) for conspiracy and false statements re Abramoff's Indian casinos scam.

17. Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, No. 3 at the CIA under Porter Goss, tied to the Duke Cunningham scandal, and poker "read money laundering" parties with limos and hookers for government officials and representatives. Foggo was indicted for fraud February 13, 2007 by fired US attorney for Southern California Carol Lam two days before she left office. On May 10, 2007, an expanded, superseding indictment was filed against Foggo, and Cunningham associate and co-conspirator Brent Wilkes.

18. Duke Cunningham convicted of receiving $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors and conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud, and tax evasion, the MZM connection. Mitchell Wade the founder of the defense contracting firm MZM purchased Cunningham's Del Mar home for $1,675,000 then put it back on the market a month later for $975,000. Cunningham lived in Washington on a yacht owned by Wade. In exchange for these kinds of bribes and favors, Cunningham steered contracts to MZM. One of the first in July 2002 was for $140,000 for computers and office furniture for Vice President Cheney which turned out in actuality to be for anthrax screening (for which MZM had zero expertise). Another in September 2002 was for a data storage system for CIFA (see item 158 on CIFA's domestic spying). $5.4 million of the $6.3 million contract was profit. As it turned out the system was incompatible with CIFA's and was never installed. As often happens in these kinds of arrangements, Lt. Gen. James C. King who helped set up CIFA went to work at MZM and became its President in June 2005 replacing Wade. By the time that Cunningham pled guilty on November 28, 2005, he had managed to steer $150 million in contracts to MZM, a firm which before Cunningham and Wade hooked up received no important government contracts. Another player in the Cunningham scandals was Brent Wilkes who founded ADCS a data conversion firm. He too won contracts through Cunningham and according to Wade set up a prostitution ring for the benefit of Cunningham and other legislators at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels.

19. Tom Delay, creator of the K Street Project, squeezing lobbyists to finance Republicans only, indicted for conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws (money laundering) in Texas, also connections to the Abramoff scandal. Major figure in Washington culture of corruption.

20. Mark Foley, chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, resigned over the House page scandal: sending sexually explicit messages to pages.

21. Cheney's Energy Policy, Big Oil's writing of it, and refusal to divulge that participation.

22. Tax cuts for the wealthiest, corporations and on capital gains; retention of the AMT.

23. Global warming: denial of manmade origin, followed by minimization of the effects of the manmade contribution, continued reliance on fossil and carbon based fuels, little movement on CAFE standards and conservation, and political interference in scientific reports:

March 13, 2001, Bush rejects Kyoto Protocols (finished December 1997 but never ratified by the US Senate) and casts doubt on the causes of climate change.

June 11, 2001, in reference to a report by the National Academy of Sciences, Bush questions both the extent of global warming, its impact, and the manmade contribution to it.

February 14, 2002, Bush announces his Clear Skies Initiatives which lacks any limits on CO2.

April 2002, at the urging of ExxonMobil Bush blocks reelection of Robert Watson, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and advocate of reducing greenhouse gases.

June 3, 2002, an EPA report to the UN admits global warming largely due to human activities.

June 4, 2002, Bush dismisses the report as "put out by the bureaucracy" and reiterates his opposition to Kyoto.

September 2002, for the first time in six years, the annual EPA report on air pollution "Latest Findings on National Air Quality: 2001 Status and Trends" omits the section on global warming.

June 23, 2003, the EPA issues "Draft Report on the Environment 2003" in which the section on global warming was pulled after the Administration sought to replace data showing sharp increases in global temperatures with references to a study funded by the American Petroleum Institute questioning the evidence for global warming.

Early 2005, Bush meets with author, non scientist, and global warming skeptic Michael Crichton. Bush had read his novel "State of Fear" which depicts global warming as a conspiracy.

June 1, 2005, Rick Peltz a scientist at the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (USCCSP) resigns and accuses Phillip Cooney, the then chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, and a non scientist, of editing scientific papers so that they would agree with Administration policies on climate change.

June 10, 2005, Cooney resigns

June 13, 2005, Cooney is hired by ExxonMobil

December 2005, NASA climatologist James Hansen reported his work was being monitored and his access to the press limited by a 24 year old Bush political appointee in NASA's PR department George C. Deutsch. Deutsch also tried to qualify references to the Big Bang as this conflicted with his fundamentalist beliefs.

February 7, 2006, Deutsch resigns after it becomes known that he lied on his resume about having a college degree.

April-November 2006, the Smithsonian (almost all of whose $1.1 billion budget comes from the government) self censors an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic which it had delayed six months while trying to tone it down.

May 31, 2007, in an NPR interview, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin admits that global warming exists but doubts that it is a problem "to be wrestled with".

(see also item 42)

24. Terri Schiavo (family and privacy rights in end of life cases); Senate Majority leader Bill Frist making his famous (and erroneous) video diagnosis; the memo written by Brian Darling, the legal counsel for Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) that the Schiavo case was a great political issue which could be used against the Democratic Senator from Florida Bill Nelson. Republicans who had cast the Schiavo case as a "moral" issue initially declared the memo a Democratic plant and dirty trick before the real source came out.

25. Big budget deficits and vastly increased national debt; the national debt as of the date of Bush's 2001 inauguration was $5.7 trillion in mid-April 2007 it was $8.8 trillion an increase of 35%.

26. The stacking of SCOTUS with right wing conservatives Roberts and Alito; the threat to Roe v. Wade; April 18, 2007 in a 5-4 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart SCOTUS upholds a ban on "partial birth" abortions (intact dilation and extraction). The procedure is rare and performed for medical reasons. Such a ban has been a goal of abortion foes who see it both as a step in a direct overturning of Roe and as part of an indirect approach to place so many restrictions on abortions as to effectively eliminate them.

....The opinion written by Kennedy is remarkable for its inflammatory use of language (partial birth abortion, abortion doctors, killing the fetus, etc.) and example (an account of the procedure by an anti-abortion nurse). Kennedy manages to condescend not only to women but to their physicians as well. He essentially gives them both his considered medical opinion, as a lawyer, and orders them to follow it. The word hubris comes to mind.

27. Medicare: a bigger time bomb than Social Security left unaddressed.

28. Medicare Part D: the 3 hour vote in the House, the doughnut hole, hitting elders with confusing multiple plans, boon to insurance and drug companies, prohibition on Medicare using its market power to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices.

29. Healthcare (in general)!!!

30. Cooked intelligence and the Office of Strategic Plans/ Doug Feith; stovepiping and Cheney's alternate intel operation; pitching stories to credulous compliant reporters like Judy Miller then citing these stories as independent evidence; Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress feeding fake stories and dubious sources like "Curveball" into the mix; the subsequent coverup and Republican delayed and deep sixed Congressional investigations into the politicization of intelligence; an Inspector General's report of February 9, 2007 declared Feith's activities inappropriate but stopped short of calling them illegal. The IG's rationale seemed more political than legal since Feith was running an intelligence operation which would be illegal.

31. 2000 Presidential election; voter suppression and cooked felons list, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Governor Jeb Bush, Bush consigliere Jim Baker oversaw the recount, Theodore Olson argued Bush v. Gore: SCOTUS decided 7-2 to stop recounts because of inconsistent procedures and 5-4 insufficient time to begin new recount, giving Bush the election.

32. 2004 Presidential election; Ohio voter irregularities that consistently favored Bush; Ken Blackwell was the Republican Secretary of State and honorary co chair of the Bush campaign who oversaw the election in Ohio. He opted for touch screen voting machines which left no paper trail and were sold by Diebold whose CEO Walden O'Dell was a Republican fundraiser. Long lines and too few machines in traditionally Democratic and minority areas also occurred.

....The Ohio Republican Party was unusually corrupt and was largely voted out in the November 2006 elections. It was epitomized by Tom Noe a Bush Pioneer who made illegal contributions to the Bush campaign at the same time he was looting millions from the state's workers comp program in a kooky coin investment scheme. He's currently serving ~20 years on state and federal charges.

33. Attempts to torpedo the 911 Commission.

34. Failure to implement the 911 Commission recommendations.

35. Marginalization of the UN; UN hating John Bolton made our UN ambassador (in a recess appointment); as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Bolton requested raw NSA transcripts 10 times in an effort to spy on and embarrass his bosses and coworkers. NSA transcripts are required to have the names of Americans redacted. Raw transcripts contain the names. It later came out that the release of unredacted transcripts was much more common than previously thought and that up to 10,000 names had been so released to various departments of government.

36. Preventive war doctrine, aka Cheney's one percent doctrine and the Bush doctrine. Bush first enunciated it at a speech at West Point on June 1, 2002. Preventive war is different from pre-emptive war. In preventive war, there is no imminent threat and this type of war is considered a war crime. (Think of Hitler attacking Poland.) In pre-emptive war, there is an imminent threat and this type of war is sanctioned by international law. (Think of the Israelis striking the Egyptian army in the Sinai in 1967) After the failure to find WMD in Iraq, the Administration dropped any pretense of imminence and overtly embraced the preventive war doctrine, asserting the right to eliminate threats before they develop.

37. Loss of US reputation internationally after massive post-911 world support.

38. No serious attempt to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The epitome of this was Condoleezza Rice's announcement in Luxor on January 15, 2007 of talks on talks to develop a "political horizon" for a return to the "road map" leading to a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement. This is not serious.

39. Underfunding of basic research.

40. Alberto Gonzales: politicization of the department, even down to the intern program, decimation of career lawyers and evisceration of divisions, like civil rights. The US attorney firings and the use of political litmus tests in hiring. The use of corruption, voter suppression, and voter fraud cases to influence elections.

....Gonzales was counsel to the President before becoming Attorney General. This should have meant that he moved from being the President's lawyer to the people's lawyer but it is clear that he continues to see his main client as the President. Some think that he is dishonest; others say he is incompetent. He is both.

41. FDA: drug testing; food safety: underfunding, cutback in inspections and inspection staff (a decrease of 12% between 2003 and 2006), reliance on self-policing, lack of inspection of imported foods, and inability to force recalls.

42. EPA: mercury levels for coal plants, delay in release of climate change reports; failure to address CO2 levels in global warming: Massachusetts v. EPA April 2007. On May 14, 2007, Bush asked government agencies to come up with a plan and submit it to him 3 weeks before he leaves office. The stalling continued on May 31, 2007, when Bush called for what was termed an aspirational goal of coming up with voluntary limits to greenhouse gases in the next 18 months (or again just before he leaves office) to go into effect after Kyoto expires in 2012.

43. Porter Goss and the gutting of the CIA: Goss a conservative Republican Congressman who chaired the House Intelligence Committee was chosen to replace George Tenet in 2004. He promised to be non-partisan in his new role, a promise he did not keep and which it is difficult to imagine anyone took seriously at the time. He brought with him some of his House staff, the "goslings". Their doctrinaire style produced confusion, demoralization, resignations, and not much else. Having done what damage he could and being largely isolated, he resigned suddenly on May 5, 2006, achieving the distinction of being one of the few people who was too big an embarrassment even for the Bush Administration, well that and that he was outmaneuvered and marginalized by the Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.

44. Militarization of intelligence: Rumsfeld perhaps out of pique that the Afghanistan operation was largely a CIA affair and conceiving the world as one big turf battle pressed to put all special operations under Pentagon control. The vast majority of intelligence funding is already funneled through the Defense Department. In addition to this, the current intelligence czar the Director of National Intelligence John Michael McConnell is a retired vice admiral. The CIA is currently headed by an active duty general Michael Hayden (USAF). The top man at the NSA (formerly headed by Hayden) is Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander (Army). And the National Counterterrorism Center is headed by another retired vice admiral John Scott Redd. General James R. Clapper Jr. is Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Lt. Gen. William J. (Jerry) Boykin is Deputy Under Secretary for Intelligence, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Michael Ennis is Deputy Director for Human Intelligence at the CIA. And retiring Army Lt. General Dell Dailey, currently the Director of the Center for Special Operations at the Pentagon which runs black ops, has been nominated to head the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism (S/CT) at the State Department.

45. Rampant cronyism!!!

46. Signing statements: As of early 2007, there have been 147 signing statements challenging over 1,140 provisions in about 150 federal bills. In the past signing statements were used to establish grounds for a possible future challenge of a law by the Executive branch or to assert that signing a specific bill did not imply a surrender of an underlying Presidential power. Bush has used them to maintain that he will only obey a law or a part of a law when it suits him.

47. Unilateral (aka Unitary) Executive doctrine: the brainchild of John Yoo and David Addington which seeks to establish a legal framework through misreading the Constitution for a Presidential dictatorship. 

48. Overuse and abuse of the National Guard and Reserves; posse comitatus; decreased ability to deal with natural disasters; also much National Guard equipment is now in Iraq and there is currently a $24 billion shortfall in equiping National Guard units in this country.

49. Increasing unpreparedness of US ground forces (Army and Marines): too many tours, extended tours, too little rest between tours, insufficient training.

50. US balance of trade deficit. This is a measure both of our general indebtedness and our competitiveness. In 2001 it was $389 billion. In 2006 it was $758.5 billion, a 95% increase. The deficit in goods (as opposed to services) accounts for almost all of this.

51. 2005 Grassley Bankruptcy bill heavily favoring lenders.

52. Mexican cross border trucking and safety concerns.

53. Karl Rove did not lose his security clearance after his participation in the Valerie Plame case. Instead it was quietly renewed in late 2006. Henry Waxman would like to know why.

54. Detention of families for immigration violations; large ICE raids which leave children of detainees unaccounted for; immigrant detentions for long periods in a hodgepodge of facilities without adequate medical care (resulting in deaths), suicide prevention, or legal representation.

55. Dubai Ports deal.

56. The Patriot Act that no one had time to read and passed anyway; the Patriot Act extension that people had the time to read and passed anyway.

57. Attempts to privatize Social Security dating all the way back to a stacked commission report of December 11, 2001; Andrew Biggs who favors privatization made deputy director of Social Security in a recess appointment after the Senate made it clear it would not take up his nomination because of his privatization views.

58. The War on Science.

59. Conviction of David Safavian for lying and obstruction June 20, 2006 re his dealings with Jack Abramoff. In the 1990s, Safavian was a business partner of Grover Norquist. In 2002, he was named Senior Advisor and Acting Deputy Chief of Staff at the GSA and in November 2003 was made head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the OMB in the White House.

60. Presidential adviser Claude Allen stealing from Target.

61. Bush casually admits to lying about decision to fire Rumsfeld.

62. Armstrong Williams and paid propagandists.

63. Decimation of the Labor Department presided over by Elaine Chao, married to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; job safety, job creation, wage increases, unions, and workers' rights have languished under her stewardship. Edwin Foulke who heads OSHA continues the Administration policy of trusting to self-regulation of industry, by industry, for industry.

64. Net neutrality and media content and ownership policies.

65. Backing Israel while it destroyed Lebanon July 12, 2006-August 14, 2006.

66. Presidential Daily Brief August 6, 2001: Bin Laden determined to attack in US.

67. EPA chief Christie Todd Whitman declares toxic filled Ground Zero safe for cleanup. On August 9, 2003 the EPA Inspector General finds differently. In Congressional testimony June 25, 2007, Whitman states that it was not her fault and blames the terrorists for the site being toxic.

68. Sago mining disaster hearings and MHSA's David Dye who walked out of the hearings; Bush push for reduction in fines for safety violations and non-collection of them since 2001.

69. Bush nominates Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court on October 3, 2005. She was serving as White House counsel after Alberto Gonzales went to the DOJ. A typical Bush crony appointment, nevertheless it quickly runs into problems. Miers has little knowledge of Constitutional law, but what dooms her nomination is that conservatives don't think she is conservative enough. Think Roe v. Wade. The nomination is withdrawn October 27, 2005. A few months later Miers' involvement in the firings of the US attorneys begins.

70. Bush vetoes a stem cell research bill July 19, 2006 (Bush's first veto). Bush vetoes a second stem cell research bill June 20, 2007 (Bush's third veto).

71. Attack on Plan B contraception, staffing Women's Health positions with religious conservatives: Dr. Eric Keroack at Health and Human Services who thought birth control demeaning to women and Dr. David Hager at FDA who tried to keep Plan B prescription only. His wife contended in divorce proceedings that he had repeatedly sod*mized her without her consent.

72. Clear Skies Act of February 14, 2002 a failed attempt to weaken the Clean Air Act. Bush reacted by changing standards on nitrogen oxide, SO2, and mercury through the EPA. The Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003 based on bad science in how to protect communities from forest fires and on the effects of "thinning" forests, i.e disrupting ecosystems. The real aim was to remove public scrutiny on sweetheart deals with logging companies by claiming such deals were to protect communities even when there were no communities in the vicinity.

73. Missile defense shield that doesn't work. So far the only tangible result is that Vladimir Putin has used it as an excuse to introduce a new class of MIRVed (multiple warhead) ICBMs and threaten the Europeans. This is payback for the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty announced December 12, 2001 and entered into effect June 13, 2002. On June 14, Russia announced that it was pulling out of START II (negotiated in the 1990s) which covered the de-MIRVing of ICBMs and which Russia had never gotten around to ratifying anyway. Putin knows that Russia is not threatened by such an ineffective system and that Russia has plenty of conventional ICBMs to overwhelm it even if it did work. As for targeting Europe, although it sounds scary, this represents little change from current policy. De-targeted Russian (and US) missiles can be re-targeted in a matter of seconds to minutes. On July 14, 2007, Putin suspended Russia's participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty. The Bush missile shield is providing an excellent excuse for Russia to detach itself from the security framework put in place at the end of the Cold War.

74. Leandro Aragoncillo naturalized Filipino-American in Cheney's office (previously Gore's) accused of spying for the Philippines and possibly France, pled guilty to unlawfully possessing secret US government documents. He was sentenced to 10 years on July 18, 2007.

75. Defunding overseas AIDS programs that promoted condom use for prevention; ineffective abstinence only programs. With these should be mentioned domestic abstinence only programs directed at teens which have proven to be abysmal failures.

76. Call for a constitutional amendment declaring marriage to be between one man and one woman.

77. Opening up Bristol Bay, the last pristine large-scale salmon fishery in the world, to oil drilling. Congress has also sanctioned further drilling in the Gulf of Mexico including off the coast of Florida. Interior has proposed drilling off the coast of Virginia which would need Congressional approval which isn't likely.

78. Accusation that Clintons trashed the White House before leaving, including stealing the Ws from keyboards.

79. Gannon/Guckert a working male prostitute in the White House press corps.

80. Native American trust funds and Trust Responsibility to Indian Country.

81. Selling creationist materials at the Grand Canyon gift shop claiming it was 6000 years old.

82. Banning photographing return of coffins of slain American soldiers!!!

83. False military reporting: Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch. Pat Tillman was an NFL player who post-911 joined the Army and was killed in Afghanistan April 22, 2004. He was immediately mythologized John Wayne-style by the military. On May 28, 2004, it came out that he died in a friendly fire incident. Details of Tillman's death and the coverup surrounding it continue to dribble out. On July 13, 2007, the Bush White House invoked Executive privilege on its communications with the Pentagon concerning the story pursuant to requests from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. It is likely that Bush knew within a week of Tillman's death that the initial accounts of it were false. Executive privilege has become an indispensable tool in the stonewall this Administration has constructed around itself.

....On July 31, 2007, retired Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger who headed Army special forces received a letter of reprimand from Army Secretary Pete Geren for his role in the affair and may lose a star and a tenth of his retirement pay. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal who heads the Special Operations (black ops) Command approved Tillman's Silver Star citation on April 28, 2004 in which Tillman is described as being killed by devastating enemy fire. The next day he sent a back channel memo saying he thought Tillman may have been the victim of friendly fire. McChrystal remains on active duty and has never been punished although a Pentagon Inspector General's report recommended that action be taken against him for misleading and inaccurate statements.

84. AIPAC espionage scandal; former DOD employee Lawrence Franklin pled guilty to passing information on Iran to Israel through two AIPAC employees.

85. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram; the Marine massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha and its coverup. A few cases:

Rasul: On June 28, 2004 SCOTUS in a 6-3 decision ruled that the US court system had jurisdiction over non US nationals held at Guantanamo. Rasul had been released to the UK before the ruling on March 29, 2004.

Hamdi: On June 28, 2004 SCOTUS 8-1 ruled that U.S. citizens can not be detained indefinitely as enemy combatants without due process. Hamdi was released to Saudi Arabia on October 9, 2004 on condition that he give up his US citizenship.

Hamdan: On June 29, 2006, SCOTUS in a 5-3 decision ruled that Bush's military tribunals were illegal under the UCMJ and the Geneva Conventions and needed Congressional authorization (which was supplied by the Military Commissions Act or MCA of September 2006)

Khadr/Hamdan: On June 4, 2007, a military court dismissed charges against them because their Combat Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) had designated them enemy combatants. The MCA authorizes trials for "unlawful" enemy combatants only, which they had not been designated.

al Marri: On June 11, 2007, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that a legal US resident (similar to Hamdi) can not be denied due process and held indefinitely as an enemy combatant outside the purview of the US judicial system.

86. Asserted right to open US mail.

87. The housing bubble, its collapse, subprime mortgage crisis. Since about 1998, subprime mortgage loans have accounted for about 1/4 of US home sales. Such mortgages allowed people with low or bad credit ratings to purchase homes. Easy credit resulted in a housing boom/bubble between 2000 and 2005 and was touted as a major plank of Bush's "ownership society". The problem was people were sold too much house financed by loans that they could initially, if marginally, afford but which they could not after a few years as the terms on their loans changed and monthly payments greatly increased. The effects of this nonsensical lending and speculation were delayed for awhile as the housing market was on the way up and the value of homes (including those financed by subprime loans) steadily increased, but in late 2006 the bubble became unsustainable and burst. Ameriquest the largest subprime lender went belly up after a $325 million settlement with 30 state Attorney Generals for deceptive lending and marketing practices. (Its former CEO Robert Arnell was appointed Ambassador to the Netherlands by George Bush.) It was not alone. Other subprime lenders like Mortgage Lenders Network USA and Ownit followed suit. Market analysts try to downplay the significance of the subprime disaster but its effects continue to ripple through financial markets. For one thing most of the mortgage loans were not held by the original lenders but sold to investors and hedge funds. As a result two Bear Stearns funds failed and on August 9, 2007 the French bank BNP Paribas froze withdrawals from 3 of its funds due to subprime losses sparking a major sell off in stock markets and forcing central banks to inject ~$180 billion into markets over a 24 hour period to avoid a credit crunch. The fallout from this housing bubble collapse will be with us for years and is going to be very, very expensive.

88. Bush connections to Enron and Ken Lay. Lay was connected to the elder Bush but helped finance the younger Bush's gubernatorial campaign. In 2000 he was a Bush Pioneer, and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund the Republican convention and the Bush inaugural celebration. Through Enron, he also contributed more than a million dollars in soft money to the Republican party. In exchange, Bush stayed out of the California energy crisis and Lay participated in Cheney's Energy Task Force which wrote Bush's business friendly energy policy. When Enron collapsed, Bush could barely remember ever having met the man.

89. Refusing to intervene in the California electricity crisis in early 2001.

90. Lack of action on Darfur despite Congress declaring it genocide in a resolution of June 22, 2004 and Bush's own Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 9, 2004.

91. Failure to adequately fund programs to reduce poorly secured nuclear material in Russia.

92. Refusal to grant security clearances to OPR (Office of Public Responsibility) lawyers investigating the role of Gonzales both as WH counsel and later as AG in authorizing warrantless NSA wiretapping thus quashing the investigation.

93. Political interference in the Justice Department lawsuit against Big Tobacco. 

94. White House involvement in election day phone jamming of Democrats in New Hampshire November 5, 2002; Charles McGee, former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party pled guilty to conspiracy; James Tobin New England head of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee made two dozen calls to the White House over a three day period during this time. He was convicted for his participation. This was reversed on appeal March 21, 2007 and his case was sent back to the district court.

95. Sweetheart plea deal for Steven Griles former No. 2 at the Interior Department. Griles and his then girlfriend Italia Federici worked with Jack Abramoff and later lied to Congress about it. The proposed deal by the government: no cooperation demand, the minimum 10 months, 5 to be served at the home of his now wife Sue Ellen Wooldridge who had just left Justice where she was an assistant attorney general heading the environment division. She signed a generous consent decree with ConocoPhillips despite being friends with a Conoco vice president and despite the fact that Conoco was being represented by Griles.

....On June 26, 2007, US District Judge Ellen Huvelle sentenced Griles. Griles asked for probation and blamed the Senate for his lying. The judge didn't buy this or the government's deal and doubled his prison time to the full 10 months. He was also fined $30,000 and given 3 years probation.

96. The unfired (Bush appointed) US attorneys who targeted 80% of their political corruption cases against Democrats. 

97. Insertion into the Patriot Act extension of language allowing US attorneys to be named without Senate approval. This provision originated with Daniel Collins a former Associate Deputy AG back in 2003 but was taken by then Assistant AG for Legislative Affairs (now Principal Associate Deputy AG) William Moschella in 2005 and forwarded to Brett Tolman, a protege of Utah Senator Orrin Hatch on Arlen Specter's staff who snuck it into the bill. Specter denied knowledge of the insertion and said he had not read the bill. He admitted, however, that his chief of staff Michael O'Neil did know. As a reward, Tolman was nominated US attorney for Utah and confirmed by the Senate July 21, 2006 in the usual way and not the one he slipped into the Patriot Act. Gonzales approved but maintained he didn't know how it happened.

98. Massive and illegal abuse by FBI of National Security Letters (administrative warrants) or NSLs. A report by DOJ Inspector General Glenn Fine of March 2007 estimated that 143,000 NSLs had been issued between 2003 and 2005. An exact number was not possible because recordkeeping was so bad that an unknown number were never properly recorded. In response to the IG's findings, Alberto Gonzales stated that he was unaware of abuses in the program although he had begun receiving reports about them beginning in 2005. On June 15, 2007, DC federal district court judge John Bates ordered the FBI to begin producing documents related to NSL abuse pursuant to a FOIA request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation by July 5. On July 13, 2007, Attorney General Gonzales and FBI Director Mueller announced that a new office would be formed within DOJ's National Security Division to oversee the program and prevent abuses. Of course, these were the same people who promised that there would be no abuses in the first place.

99. Attempted use of GSA to promote Republican candidates; presentation by Scott Jennings deputy political director to Karl Rove at a video conference of 40 political appointees hosted by GSA head Lurita Doan in violation of the Hatch Act. Later, Doan testifying before Congress had severe memory loss. Doan at GSA has been involved in various contract irregularities. In a letter to Bush on June 8, 2007, the Office of Special Counsel which investigates this kind of thing called for Doan to be punished to the fullest extent for violations of the Hatch Act and obstructing its investigation.

....At least 20 other meetings involving senior officials from 15 government agencies and the White House discussing political prospects were held before the 2006 elections also in violation of the Hatch Act. The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) has begun investigations into these.

100. Karl Rove and the culture of corruption. What did Karl Rove see in George Bush that he tied his fortunes to Bush's political star? Rove saw Bush as inhabiting the intersection of often disparate and conflicting elements of the Republican Party. Bush came from a powerful Texas family. His father had been President and that meant not only name recognition but contacts to the Republican Establishment. Bush Senior was also tightly connected to the conservative monied classes in Texas, the Northeast, and the country more generally. Despite this, Bush Junior assiduously cultivated and exploited a "good ole boy" image so at odds with his family's wealth and power. Although born in Connecticut and schooled in the Northeast, as a Texan and with the Everyman shtik, Bush could also lay claim to being both a Southerner and a Westerner and so tap into two important bastions of the Republican Party. As a recovering alcoholic turned to religion, Bush Junior added in another part of the Republican base the religious Right, evangelical and family values vote. With this and a smattering of Spanish, Rove saw Bush could court the Hispanic vote as well. In other words, from Rove's point of view Bush was a political goldmine.

....Here were two men with little knowledge of or curiosity about the world, motivated by no great philosophy but with a great thirst for power and a willingness to do anything no matter how sleazy or dirty to win it. This was not about consensus building. It was about 50% plus 1 or close enough for a court to decide in their favor. Rove probably would have sought to politicize the federal government in favor of the Republican Party anyway but the disputed nature of the 2000 vote gave him an added incentive and 911 supplied him with a golden opportunity. The result has been the most thoroughgoing politicization, often in contravention of the law, of all aspects of government in our lifetimes.

....The goal was to carve out a permanent majority using the 50% plus one philosophy, but there were two problems. First, while Bush personified the many facets of the modern Republican Party, neither he nor Rove ever unified them. The conflicts between social conservatives, libertarians, and the wealthy remained. The wealthy got their tax cuts but the financial situation of Nascar dads became more precarious. Social issues got two Supreme Court justices but no real money, and to date little change in the law. Nativist types clashed with pro-business ones over immigration. Rove's outreach to the expanding numbers of minorities in the country came crashing down. The result was a peeling off not a building up until Bush and Rove were left with only their hardcore base of 25-30%. Second, placing political loyalty above professionalism and experience in government did not strengthen the Republican Party or the conservative cause. It created instead an environment of corruption, cronyism, incompetence, and failure. Examples of this can be found everywhere in this Administration and form much of the content of this list, but the epitome of this collision between ideology and the real world is Iraq. The practical problem with politicization of government is that it doesn't work and produces bad results of which Iraq is the most obvious and worse.

....On August 13, 2007, Karl Rove Bush's chief political adviser throughout his entire political career announced his resignation to become effective on August 31, 2007. From his 5 appearances before the grand jury in the Valerie Plame/outing of a CIA agent case, to violations of the Hatch Act and the Presidential Records Act, the US Attorney firings, and lobbyist Jack Abramoff's influence peddling schemes, investigations have swirled around Rove. Bush has invoked Executive Privilege to protect him. It may not have been enough. In Washington's culture of corruption, all roads lead to Rove.

101. Voter suppression, voter ID laws, exaggerating the problem of voter fraud, attempts to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act on its renewal; Hans von Spakovsky, a Republican volunteer in the Florida recount, was Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ's Civil Rights division where he signed off on Tom Delay's 2003 Texas redistricting plan and a 2005 Georgia voter ID law overruling staff recommendations that they were discriminatory. Both were struck down in the courts. In the Georgia case, a federal appeals judge compared the ID system to Jim Crow poll taxes. In April 2005, on his own and without consulting voting rights attorneys, Spakovsky incorrectly advised the Arizona Secretary of State that provisional ballots should not be given to voters who lacked proper ID. Spakovsky went on to be a Commissioner at the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) in a January 6, 2006 recess appointment.

....The head of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division during this period was Bradley Schlozman. Schlozman was highly political. He wanted to know if prospective hires were Republicans and forced out employees who committed the sin of not agreeing with him. Although having no prosecutorial experience, Schlozman was named US attorney for Western Missouri on March 23, 2006. In a blatant attempt at voter suppression and in contravention of DOJ guidelines, he filed voter fraud cases days before the November elections. His was one of the first of the "interim" appointments made under the revised provisions snuck into the Patriot Act and there have been suggestions that his predecessor Todd Graves was forced out to make way for him. He left in April 2007 to work at the Executive Office for US Attorneys (EOUSA). Schlozman testified about his activities before the Senate on June 5, 2007. Like most recent DOJ witnesses, he suffered from extreme memory loss. He testified that Craig Donsanto OK'ed the pre-election Missouri cases although Donsanto is the one who wrote the DOJ guidelines. A May 2007 update to these guidelines weakens or eliminates the prohibition on bringing politically sensitive cases near to an election.

....The current head of the Civil Rights Division is Wan J. Kim, an Orrin Hatch protege.

102. Campaign finance and political corruption.

103. Swift boating of John Kerry (2004); push polling and McCain's black baby in the South Carolina primary (2000); Sam Fox made Ambassador to Belgium in a recess appointment. Fox's nomination was withdrawn in the Senate where it faced certain defeat. Fox was controversial because he had given $50,000 to the anti-Kerry smear campaign of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

104. No Child Left Behind, based on flawed and false data, chronically underfunded, capricious in its evaluations, places test scores above knowledge; allegations have arisen that people at the Department of Education pushed reading programs as part of NCLB that they had financial interests in.

105. Susan E. Dudley made administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget. Dudley who doesn't believe in regulation except in extreme cases when the "market fails" was named to this powerful regulatory post in a recess appointment on April 4, 2007.

106. Paul Wolfowitz, after his disastrous hyping of the Iraq war, did a McNamara and went to the World Bank to do good. He brought his neocon values, a doctrinaire, secretive management style, and a real gift for poor leadership to rail against corruption in 3rd world countries while practicing some of it himself closer to home. Prohibited from supervising his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, a senior communications officer at the bank, he detailed her to the Department of State, gave her a raise of $47,340 twice what was permitted, and then a further raise of $13,000 bringing her salary to $193,000 tax free and making her the highest paid official in the State Department and that includes Condoleezza Rice. Wolfowitz's eventual defense of the raise was that Riza was very angry at leaving the Bank and might have sued although as the Bank later pointed out she did not have grounds to do so. Her initial boss at state was none other than Liz Cheney. Her job through State was to set up the Foundation for the Future to promote civil society in the Middle East. After 1 1/2 years there, it still has no permanent office, executive officers, or staff and has yet to disperse a grant. There is also the matter of a security clearance that Riza, a non-citizen unaffiliated with an allied government, would need to work at Defense (through an earlier contract with the defense contractor SAIC arranged by Wolfowitz through Doug Feith) or more recently at State and which would be extremely unusual to give to someone in her situation.

....Wolfowitz dragged out his departure from the Bank for nearly a month doing serious damage to the institution. He was eventually forced to announce his resignation on May 17, 2007 effective June 30, 2007. In keeping with his double standard on corruption and despite his disastrous stewardship at the Bank, he will not go cheaply into the night. His severance package will be in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. The poor should get such deals. On June 25, 2007, pro-business, free trader (and like Wolfowitz) neocon Robert Zoellick was approved as the World Bank's new president.

107. Kenneth Tomlinson chairman of the CPB politicized public broadcasting, commissioned a biased study to monitor liberalism on Bill Moyer's show NOW, resigned after an IG report alleged political tests and inappropriate dealings in the creating of a new show; later he was put on the board of governors for the Voice of America where there were further allegations of hiring a friend, misuse of staff, improper billing, and use of his office to run a horse racing operation.

108. Matteo Fontana, a general manager in the Office of Federal Student Aid in the Education Department held and sold shares worth at least $100,000 in Student Loan Xpress whose activities he was ostensibly overseeing. He was placed on paid leave. Fontana's boss who oversees the student loan program Theresa Shaw resigned on May 8, 2007 a few days before Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was to testify before Congress. The official reason given for Shaw's leaving was that she had "plans to take some time off." This is part of the larger scandal of sweetheart deals between universities and companies making loans to students to the detriment of students. On June 1, 2007, the Department of Education came out with new rules to regulate the $85 billion student lending business.

109. A 9th US prosecutor Tom Heffelfinger in Minnesota was replaced by Rachel Paulose. Paulose at age 33 joined the DOJ and after less than 2 months as a senior counsel to deputy attorney general Paul McNulty she was named to the USA position in Minnesota. She was also reputed to be good friends with Monica "Loyalty oaths" Goodling and had a reputation for quoting the bible and dressing down staff. As a result on April 5, 2007, three of her top assistants, career prosecutors, resigned their administrative positions and voluntarily demoted themselves rather than work with her in a sign of their complete lack of faith in her abilities.

....The push to oust Heffelfinger appears to have resulted from an attempt to suppress the Native American vote in 2004. In Minnesota, many Native Americans vote Democratic, live off reservation, and have tribal IDs as their principal source of identification. The Republican Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer refused to accept these for voting purposes. An assistant US attorney in Heffelfinger's office Rob Lewis contacted Joseph Rich a career prosecutor and the head of the voting section of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division. Rich recommended an investigation which was vetoed by Bradley Schlozman. Attempts to gather further information were effectively derailed by Hans von Spakovsky. Shortly before the November election, federal District Judge James Rosenbaum ruled that tribal IDs could be used. Heffelfinger who was cited in testimony by Monica Goodling as spending too much time on Native American issues (He headed the US attorneys subcommittee on Native American issues) resigned effective February 28, 2006. As one of her first acts, interim USA Paulose got rid of Rob Lewis.

110. Use of GWB43.com email servers through the RNC to transact government business outside the White House logging and archiving system in contravention of the law; also similar use of Blackberries; a large but unknown number of emails have now been reported "lost", a situation that is nearly impossible given current backup systems.

111. Georgia Thompson a purchasing agent in Wisconsin was convicted of steering a contract to a company in which 2 executives had contributed the maximum to Democratic Governor Jim Doyle's re-election campaign. Thompson had been a hire of the previous Republican governor and no evidence was produced at trial that she knew of the contributions. Remanded by the Republican judge who heard the case, she served 4 months of an 18 month sentence before an appeals court overturned her conviction after oral arguments where one judge typified the government's case as "beyond thin" and ordered her freed the same day. The case was brought by Bush appointed US attorney Steven Biskupic during the campaign and was used in Republican campaign ads to accuse Doyle of corruption.

112. US attorney for New Jersey and former Bush "Pioneer" Chris Christie issued subpoenas in a corruption probe of Democratic Senator Bob Menendez two months before the Nov. 2006 elections. Menendez was in a tight race with Tom Keane. After Menendez won, the investigation went away.

113. Kay Coles James, dean of Pat Robertson's Regent's government school, made director of the Office of Personnel Management in 2001. In 2002, John Ashcroft eases qualifications for DOJ hiring. The influx into the DOJ of young, poorly qualified lawyers on a conservative religious mission begins. 

114. In a rushed process, Bernard B. Kerik, a Rudy Giuliani protege and former New York City Police Commissioner, was nominated to be Secretary of Homeland Security December 3, 2004. He withdrew his name a week later ostensibly because of his employment of an undocumented immigrant as a nanny. However, it quickly came out that Kerik was also involved in a dubious stock sale of stun gun manufacturer Taser International shortly before a critical report by Amnesty International, a sexual harassment suit, connections to a construction company tied to organized crime, use of an apartment donated for 911 relief as a love nest where he could meet his girlfriends, including Judith Regan, and accepting gifts in contravention of ethics rules (for which he paid a $221,000 fine). Kerik was also the inept Interim Minister of the Interior in Iraq under Paul Bremer's CPA in 2003.

115. The Bush back story: The time in the TANG, the transfer to the Alabama National Guard, the lost years, the 1976 DUI in Maine, the business bailouts, the governorship, hardline on drug crimes despite his own past history and a fast and loose approach to the death penalty.

116. As of February 2006, the terrorist watchlist of the National Counterterrorism Center: the bizarrely named Terrorists Identity Datamart Environment (TIDE) has 400,000 names representing 300,000 people. The Transportation Security Administration's no-fly list had 44,000 names on it as of October 2006. 75,000 others are on an extra screening list (CBS). The size of the lists, that they contain numerous errors, that it is difficult or impossible to remove names or correct errors, the presence of common names, and the ease with which these lists can be subverted by real terrorists raise questions why such large, sloppy lists exist at all.

117. Insta-declassification in contravention of Bush's own Executive order 13292 and without consultation with the original classifying agency. Also abusive and indiscriminate classification (secrecy for secrecy's sake) of government documents.

118. Vice President Cheney shoots 78 year old lawyer Harry Whittington Feb. 11, 2006 during a quail hunt at the Armstrong ranch in Texas. The shooting is not reported until the next day and then by the ranch owner to a Corpus Christi reporter. Under pressure and despite his disdain for the press, Cheney finally breaks his silence Feb. 15 on Fox News. Any real investigation is smothered by the powerful Armstrong family (who by the way are the ones who set Cheney up in his job at Halliburton) and the story remains incomplete.

119. Homeland Security's Automated Targeting System (ATS) database which makes a terrorist risk assessment on anyone traveling to or from the US by any means and keeps it for 40 years.

120. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refuses to recuse himself from Cheney's appeal of a Sierra Club lawsuit to keep records of his 2001 Energy Task Force secret. Shortly after SCOTUS agreed to take up the case, Scalia flew with Cheney on Jan. 5, 2004 on Air Force Two to Louisiana for a duck hunting trip. Cheney stayed two days and Scalia four. June 24, 2004, SCOTUS decides 7-2 to send the case back to the district court for reconsideration of the government's separation of powers argument. Scalia and Thomas going further concurred and dissented thinking that the appellate court should have been the one to deny the Sierra Club's discovery request. May 1, 2005, the DC Court of Appeals dismisses the Sierra Club case holding that Cheney could keep the participation of oil companies in his Energy Task Force secret.

121. The Election Assistance Commission which was created to do election research after the 2000 election debacle issued a December 2006 report which changed the conclusions of its experts and exaggerated the problem of voter fraud. Previously, the Commission released a report only under Congressional pressure that indicated that voter ID programs suppressed voter turnout among minorities. The EAC also has oversight of voting machines and voting software in which it has failed.

122. Bush tried unsuccessfully to kill the confirmation of Mohammed ElBaradei to a third term as head of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). ElBaradei and the IAEI had stated in the runup to the Iraq war that the famous aluminum tubes were for rockets not centrifuges, that the Niger documents were fakes, that there was no evidence that Iraq was trying to reconstitute a nuclear program, and that the Iraqis had been cooperative with IAEA inspections. As part of the Bush campaign in 2005 to oust him, the NSA tapped his phones in an unsuccessful attempt to show he was being soft on Iran. John Bolton unsuccessfully lobbied for more aggressive surveillance of him. ElBaradei was reconfirmed and later that same year won the Nobel Peace Prize.

123. Alice Fisher named to head the Criminal Division at the DOJ in a recess appointment, later confirmed September 19, 2006 (just before the Nov. 2006 elections). A protegee of Michael Chertoff, she worked under him as deputy head of the Criminal Division but has no experience as a criminal prosecutor. She also worked on the Senate investigation into the Clinton era Whitewater scandal and was a lobbyist of HCA the healthcare company controlled by the family of the recent Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist. She has opposed rescinding the more gratuitous aspects of the Patriot Act, favored its extension unchanged, participated in discussions of abusive interrogation methods at Guantanamo, and reportedly has social ties to Tom Delay's defense team. Under her leadership, the investigation into Abramoff's many connections (some of which go back to Delay) has gone nowhere.

124. After being admonished 3 times by the House Ethics Committee in 2004, Tom Delay through Dennis Hastert had the Republican head of the committee replaced and staff fired. Ethics rules were also changed making it easier to kill ethics investigations. An initial provision to allow an indicted member of the House leadership to continue to hold his position was rescinded after negative publicity.

125. Collusion of the media: the NYT, WaPo, Time, Newsweek, cable and network news in the Bush disasters through silence, lack of investigation, and above all accepting uncritically whatever spin came out of the White House on anything.

126. Failure of the Democratic Party to act as an opposition party for nearly 5 years.

127. A supreme lack of oversight by a rubberstamping Republican Congress over the same 5 years.

128. The use of the 2002 AUMF against Iraq to justify the Bush invasion and an ongoing US military presence there. The UN Resolutions it cites, including those sanctioning military force, are from the 1990-1991 Gulf War. The UN never passed a resolution that authorized the use of military force in the Second Gulf War. On June 28, 2004, the US returned sovereignty to the reconstituted state of Iraq and in doing so acknowledged that the Iraq referenced in the AUMF as well as the legal rationale for a US presence in (and occupation of) the country no longer existed.

129. President Bush awards the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, to General Tommy Franks, George Tenet, and Paul Bremer for their efforts to create the disaster that Iraq has become.

130. Real ID Act of 2005 mandates essentially a national identity card by forcing states to have nationally compatible driver's licenses. The program has multiple goals: facilitate surveillance and data mining and make it harder for illegal aliens to get jobs and for the poor to vote.

131. Jose Padilla. This is not about a bad and deluded man, but rather that an American citizen held in the United States could be held for 3 1/2 years (May 8, 2002-January 3, 2006) outside the purview of American courts and tortured. He was transferred to the regular US legal system only because his case challenging Bush's power to declare him an illegal enemy combatant was wending its way to the Supreme Court. The transfer successfully pre-empted this when the Court declined April 3, 2006 to hear the case. The lack of a Supreme Court determination and passage of the Military Commissions Act mean that any American can still be declared an illegal enemy combatant and held indefinitely without charge, and if the MCA is to be believed (and unlike the Padilla case) without any right to habeas corpus.

....On May 14, 2007, Padilla who was initially accused of being a terrorist mastermind behind a plot to detonate a dirty bomb inside the US was put on trial for being a minor member of a conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim outside the US. Among the many dubious and disturbing aspects of this case: the length and nature of detention, his mental fitness to stand trial, the change in jurisdiction from military to civilian, and the major reduction in the scope of the charges and Padilla's role in them, the government claims it "lost" evidence, specifically a DVD of Padilla's last interrogation as an enemy combatant from March 2, 2004. On August 16, 2007, he and his codefendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi were found guilty on all counts.

132. National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act of 2005. This sets up a state by state but nationally compatible data base of prescribed controlled substances available to many agencies. The substances include not only painkillers taken for more than a couple days but also tranquillizers and sleeping pills.

133. Jean-Bertrand Aristide the President of Haiti who was certainly no Boy Scout was flown out of the country on February 29, 2004 in the midst of an insurrection that was not exactly opposed by the Bush Administration "willingly" according to American authorities, "kidnapped" according to Aristide.

134. Hugo Chavez the controversial President of Venezuela was briefly deposed in a military coup April 11, 2002. The Bush Administration initially recognized the interim government of Pedro Carmona the head of the national business federation and said that Chavez had brought the coup on himself. The coup collapsed and Chavez resumed power two days later on April 13, 2002. Later the Bush Administration condemned the coup.

135. Bush's ethanol program will not solve America's energy problems. It is a boon to corn state farmers and the politicians who represent them but depletes soil that would be better reserved for food production. Ethanol is also a carbon based fuel and contributes to global warming directly through its burning and indirectly through its production.

136. Post the November 2006 elections, the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has repeatedly used the filibuster to obstruct Congressional action. This has happened so far on Iraq resolutions (even some co-sponsored by Republicans), an intelligence bill requiring greater accountability, and a bill to allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. This is especially egregious in light of the last Congress where then Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist repeatedly threatened Democratic Senators contemplating a filibuster with the "nuclear option" of doing away with it by changing Senate rules.

137. The stacking of the federal judiciary with unqualified rightwing hacks; the role of the Gang of 14 (7 Democrats and 7 Republicans) who came together to avoid the nuclear option and push hyper-conservative judicial choices: Janice Rogers Brown (DC Circuit), William Pryor (11th Circuit), and Priscilla Owen (5th Circuit); no agreement could be made on two others William Myers and Henry Saad and their names were eventually withdrawn. The Gang of 14 was also involved in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh (also to the important DC Circuit). Kavanaugh had no trial experience but had worked for essentially partisan causes, such as Kenneth Starr's Clinton investigations for 5 years, the 2000 Florida recount, and as an Associate Counsel in the current Bush Administration where he worked to nominate and confirm unqualified, radically conservative candidates rather like himself.

....On June 27, 2007, Senator Patrick Leahy raised the possibility that Kavanaugh might be prosecuted for lying to Congress. In testimony, Kavanaugh said he had taken no part in developing the Administration's policy with regard to enemy combatants. Recent articles in the Washington Post indicate that he had.

138. Ralph "I need to start humping in corporate accounts" Reed led the Christian Coalition in the 1990s and was an associate of both Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist. Abramoff funneled millions in 1999 and 2000 to Reed in exchange for Reed's mobilizing evangelicals in support of Abramoff's various schemes. These included: spiking an Alabama law which would have allowed gaming at dog tracks in competition with Choctaw casinos which were Abramoff clients; similar opposition to an Alabama state lottery; opposition to the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act (the rationale, a major stretch, was that it didn't go far enough) for his client eLottery; opposition to a Tigua casino in Texas to the benefit of his clients the Lousiana Coushatta; and then in 2002 persuading the Tigua that he Abramoff could use his connection to Reed to help them get back their casino. Reed was an indispensable cog in the Abramoff machine.

139. Aggressive proselytizing by Christian evangelical faculty and cadets at the US Air Force Academy. A report was issued June 2005 but it is not clear if much has changed. The USAF Academy also has a recurrent history of cheating and sexual assault.

140. The Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives, an idea for those who don't believe in the separation of church and state or the Establishment Clause in the Constitution (First Amendment). A political and financial sop to rightwing Christians, the program has given no money to non-Christian groups. It is unclear how much money has actually gone through the program. The real problem is that any money should be distributed in this way.

....On June 25, 2007, SCOTUS ruled 5-4 in Hein, Director, White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives et al v. Freedom from Religion Foundation, Inc. et al that taxpayers do not have standing to contest this spending in violation of the Establishment clause A) because they can not show direct harm and B) because Establishment challenges under Flast v. Cohen are only allowed if a specific Congressional statute is at issue. SCOTUS held that the Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives had been created wholly within the Executive Branch and that no specific monies had been appropriated to it by Congressional statute so no challenge could be made. This is fairly squirrely reasoning (increasingly typical of the Roberts Court) because the money didn't just appear out of nowhere and what money the Congress does appropriate and how it is spent by the Executive must meet Constitutional requirements such as the Establishment Clause. In any case, the bottom line is that in the view of SCOTUS the Congress and/or another President are the ones to change this. Ordinary Americans need not apply.

141. Military disability ratings: A 30% rating is the cutoff between receiving payments, staying within the military healthcare system, and eligibility for family coverage and is now given out more rarely than before the beginning of the Iraq war, despite the large number of soldiers with severe injuries.

142. Earmarks: Special interest funding directed to a specific project by an individual legislator. The most famous example was Republican Senator Ted Stevens' $223 million for a bridge to nowhere in Alaska. Earmarks exploded in number and expense under the Republicans. Bush only decided that there was something bad about them (nearly 6 years into his Presidency) when Democrats won control of the Congress.

143. Medicare privatization. This began in 1982 and grew throughout the 1990s with 17.3% of Medicare recipients enrolled in 1999 in private plans when it went into decline. Since the start of Medicare Part D (passed 2003, went into effect January 1, 2006), numbers have begun to rise again. One of the reasons for this increase is that they are being aggressively, and often unscrupulously, marketed to unsuspecting elders. In addition, private plans receive government subsidies to make them competitive with Medicare itself. This is money that could go to reducing Medicare premiums generally but instead goes to higher overhead and profits for private providers.

144. Signing of a nuclear cooperation deal with India December 18, 2006. This is another example of the Bush Administration and Congress's selective approach to nuclear non-proliferation. Israel's nuclear program is ignored. Iraq is, in part, invaded for a mythical program that existed only in the fevered imaginations of Cheney, Feith, Bush, and Rice. At the same time, nuclear moves in North Korea and Iran are opposed. Meanwhile the deal with India will allow it to dedicate some of its facilities completely to nuclear arms production.

145. Julie MacDonald, who has a degree in civil engineering and no background in the natural sciences, was named the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in the Interior Department on May 2004. She altered and reversed conclusions in scientific reports to prevent species from being protected. The Bush Administration to date has listed 58 species (54 as the result of litigation) as endangered as opposed to 512 in the Clinton years and 234 by the first President Bush. MacDonald also hired Todd Willens who worked with the former Republican Representative and anti-environmentalist Richard Pombo. According to a March 2007 Inspector General report, she also passed on internal department documents to the oil industry and land developers in contravention of federal rules and to aid filing of lawsuits against the department. Facing oversight hearings, she resigned April 30, 2007.

....The endangered species program has been without a director for a year and, as of July 2007, 30% of its positions are unfilled. On July 20, 2007, H. Dale Hall the current director of the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that 8 decisions made by MacDonald concerning species protection and land use would be reviewed and likely reversed.

146. From tales of the revolving door. Darleen Druyun was a principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition and management where she negotiated a sweetheart deal worth $23 billion for leasing air tankers from Boeing. She was also negotiating at the same time for an executive position at Boeing. The deal was made. She left the Air Force and took up her new position at Boeing. In a 2004 plea agreement, Druyun pled guilty to fraud and was sentenced to 9 months in a minimum security prison, 7 months of home detention, 150 hours of community service, and required to pay a $5,000 fine.

147. Luis Posada Carriles is an anti-Castro terrorist who masterminded the October 6, 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner killing 73. He had worked before this with the CIA and after the Cubana bombing during the Reagan Administration helped funnel aid to the Contras. In 1997, he directed a series of bombings in Cuba against the growing tourist industry there. In April 2005, running out of places to hide, he requested asylum in the US but the following month was detained for entering the country illegally. Despite his terrorist past, he was released on bond to home detention on April 19, 2007. On May 8, 2007, a federal judge in Texas dismissed the case against him for lying to immigration authorities. Contrast his treatment to that of terrorists like the "waterboarded" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Apparently it is not what you bomb but who you bomb that counts.

148. James Knodell, Director of the Office of Security at the White House, in testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform chaired by Henry Waxman said that no internal White House investigation was ever initiated (contrary to Executive order 12958 requiring one) in the period between July 14, 2003 when Valerie Plame a covert CIA agent was outed in a column by Robert Novak and September 29, 2003 when the Department of Justice asked the FBI to investigate pursuant to a request from the CIA of September 16, 2003.

149. Robert Cobb, NASA's tame Inspector General since 2002, tipped off former NASA head Sean O'Keefe to audits he would be performing and search warrants the FBI would be executing. O'Keefe, primarily known for his forceful dealing with the 1991 Tailhook scandal, was an accountant by training without a scientific or engineering background whose tenure at NASA was marked by drift. He got the top NASA job in December 2002 through his connection with Dick Cheney and, while still NASA administrator, campaigned for Bush in 2004 as a "private citizen". He left in February 2005. The inappropriate contact between NASA administrators and the NASA Inspector General continues as well as its coverup. The NASA General Counsel Mike Wholley illegally destroyed a tape of a meeting (between the current NASA head Michael Griffin and Cobb and his staff) to avoid it ever becoming public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

150. Evangelos Dimitros Soukas a convicted felon serving 8 years for tax fraud was scheduled to testify on April 12, 2007 before the Senate Finance Committee on identity theft and filing false tax returns. The Department of Justice challenged the right of the Congress to order a prisoner in federal custody to appear before it, even though this has happened numerous times in the past. A federal district judge did not agree with the DOJ and Soukas testified. The DOJ move appeared baffling, an empty assertion of Executive power, but, may have been pre-emptive to prevent more controversial prisoners from testifying in the future.

151. Excessive corporate pay, retirement, and severance packages in the Bush era. Even post-Enron, control over executive compensation still rests largely in the hands of the executives themselves and the compliant boards of directors they often select. Pay is still not coupled to performance and stock options still encourage executives to manipulate stock prices (which is very much not the same thing as performance as the Enron case showed) for their own benefit. Reporting the cost of stock options was not mandated by the SEC until August 2006. The total cost of multi-year options is still not reported fully but treated as a year by year expense making the true cost look smaller. Back dating of options so they could be purchased at a lower price was also fairly common until somebody noticed it constituted fraud. Spring loading, a variant of insider trading, i.e. exercising an option and buying just before news that will drive up the stock price, still occurs.

152. Eliot Spitzer the then New York State Attorney General (and not the SEC or the Bush Administration) announced on May 21, 2002 that Merrill Lynch had agreed to sever contacts between its analysis and investment divisions and to pay a $100 million fine. The lack of such separation was behind a lot of the dot com bubble in the 1990s as well as propping up Enron and facilitating its scams. It is a recognition of sorts of a systemic problem, although the fine was a tiny fraction of what investors lost and it is unclear how "objective" analysts are going to be even with the supposed wall to the investment side.

153. Scott Bloch initially deputy director for the Task Force for Faith Based and Community Initiatives became the head of the Office of Special Counsel (whose function is to protect whistleblowers) on January 5, 2004. Once there he summarily closed hundreds of ongoing cases, decried cases that had a "homosexual agenda", tried to use the office to protect a non-governmental employee who was a defender of Intelligent Design, gave 12 of his in-office critics the choice of immediate re-assignment to field offices or be fired, and was the subject of complaints filed with his own office. In April 2007, Bloch announced an investigation into Karl Rove's political machinations. The real aims of such an investigation probably do not include carrying out a real probe but are more likely an attempt by Bloch to hold on to his job, derail efforts to remove the OSC from the purview of the White House, stymie other investigations into Karl Rove, conduct a whitewash, and/or run out the clock.

154. Lax security at US nuclear facilities and airports exposed by whistleblowers Richard Levernier and Bogdan Dzakovic for which they were punished.

155. The 120,000 hours of counter terrorism related recordings that the FBI had not translated by September 2004; related to this is the case of Sibel Edmonds. She blew the whistle on the backlog and the dubious skills and allegiances of some of the translators the FBI was employing. For this she was rewarded by being fired.

156. Monica "Loyalty oaths" Goodling comes up again in an investigation of the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) into whether she used party affiliation in determining hires of entry level prosecutors. Did she? Given Gonzales‚ March 1, 2006 order delegating hiring authority to her and her role in the US attorney hiring and firing scandal, the answer is obvious.

157. Michael Baroody who was Executive Vice President of the National Association of Manufacturers a powerful K Street lobbying group was nominated by Bush on March 1, 2007 to head the Consumer Products Safety Commission. NAM has sought to limit or even eliminate corporate liability for unsafe products and environmental practices. NAM decided to give Baroody a $150,000 extraordinary payment on his way out the door. It is hard to say whether this is simply a further conflict of interest or just straightforward bribery. On May 23, 2007, Baroody withdrew his nomination, one day before the beginning of hearings.

158. The Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) created February 19, 2002 created a database the Joint Protection Enterprise Network (JPEN) [sorry for the acronym gobbledygook] composed of TALONs Threat and Local Observation Notices. These are basically raw unvalidated reports of threats posed by dangerous civilian group like the Quakers. The idea of the military spying on civilians is unsettling. The Founding Fathers after all fought a revolution over such abuses and in the 4th Amendment enunciated: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." Beyond this, CIFA did not follow its own guidelines in how it managed the material it obtained. The story does not end there. Duke Cunningham swung CIFA work to Mitchell J. Wade's company MZM in exchange for bribes. He was aided in this by CIFA Director David A. Burtt II and his top deputy Joseph Hefferon. In August 2006, Burtt resigned and Hefferon retired when the Cunningham-MZM connection was made public.

....On November 30, 2005, two days after Duke Cunningham enters into a plea agreement, all TALON reports were deleted from the JPEN database. However, the TALON program continues. (These programs never really die.) In keeping with the DOD (Department of Defense) Inspector General's usual lackluster performance, a report requested by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo in January 2006 and released June 27, 2007 on TALON failed to address who was responsible for violations in following the program's guidelines or why they occurred. The report also didn't examine if current safeguards were adequate or if the program should continue.

159. Bush's March 6, 2003 news conference. Less than two weeks before the start of the Iraq War, the "independent" press willingly play-acted spontaneity in what was a heavily scripted propaganda piece promoting the war.

160. An investigation into Bill Frist former Senate Majority Leader was closed on April 27, 2007. He was not indicted for insider trading in selling his stock in the family's large healthcare company HCA shortly before a major fall in its stock price. It was all just a coincidence, a very profitable coincidence.

161. Julie Myers was made Assistant Secretary of DHS to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a recess appointment on January 4, 2006 after the Senate failed to vote on her nomination. Bush re-nominated her January 9, 2007. Myers is another Bush hire whose lack of experience is overshadowed by who she is related to. At ICE, she has sponsored aggressive, high profile, and controversial raids against illegal immigrants. The irony of someone whose success is based not on hard work but on connection imprisoning those who are hard working but without connection is I suspect lost upon her.

162. Randall Tobias, US Director of Foreign Assistance and head of US Agency for International Development (USAID) with the rank of Deputy Secretary of State since March 29, 2006. Before this he was our first Global AIDS Coordinator (October 2003) where he criticized condom use, discouraged outreach to sexworkers, and promoted abstinence only programs. As Director of Foreign Assistance, he continued to oversee the Global AIDS program. He resigned April 27, 2007 after it came out that he had been named as using a Washington escort service. I am not a prude about these things but I do see a problem between his personal activities and his public positions.

163. Robert E. Coughlin II, deputy chief of staff of the Criminal Division at the DOJ, resigned on April 6, 2007. He was a friend and colleague of Kevin Ring who was an Abramoff associate.

164. Stuart Bowen was Inspector General for the Bremer's CPA and documented that $8.8 billion had gone missing. He stayed on as Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) chronicling waste, abuse, and fraud. In the 2007 Defense appropriations act an item was snuck in terminating Bowen's job, because well, he was doing his job. When this became known, funding was restored. In April 2007, Bowen released reports showing that in a sample of what reconstruction projects there were and which were deemed successful, most were not being maintained and were no longer usable for their original functions.

....Bowen a Republican whose investigations have proved an embarrassment to the Bush Administration is now under investigation himself subject to a complaint by a group of former employees who left his office on less than amicable terms. The complaint has been taken up by the President's Council on Integrity and Excellence headed by Clay Johnson III, a longtime friend of the President, and by Thomas Davis III the ranking Republican on the House Government Reform Committee. Davis says this is not about retribution although at this point that is exactly what it looks like.

165. Continued Republican support of the Iraq war after the November 2006 elections flying in the face of public opinion, the election results, and reality. Republican losses were largely attributable to Iraq but have done little to change the minds of Republican lawmakers. Bush and Republicans demanded that Democrats come up with an Iraq plan. When they proposed withdrawal, they were accused of micromanagement. Yet withdrawal is precisely what Republicans pushed for during the Clinton Administration when they tried to force legislative ends to deployments in both the Balkans and Somalia. War resolutions have been filibustered by Senate Republicans, sometimes and even despite the fact they co-sponsored them. Opposition to Bush's war policies are portrayed as "fringe" although they are supported by 60%-70% of the American people. They accuse Democrats of not backing the troops and then vote on a near perfect party line basis against a supplemental to fund the troops and applaud the President's veto of it on May 1, 2007 (the 4th anniversary of Bush's catastrophically wrong Mission Accomplished speech). They ask for patience and to give the surge a chance even after a record of 4 years of failure, constantly worsening conditions in Iraq, and inaction by the Iraqi government.

166. George Bush signed the "Secure Fence Act" into law on October 26, 2006. Its purpose is to construct a barrier to stem illegal immigration into the country along the Mexican border. How a 700 mile fence along a 2100 mile border would accomplish this or what effect it would have on the 12 million undocumented immigrants already in the country is unclear. The initial estimate for its cost was $2 billion, and $1.2 billion was budgeted for it. The final cost, however, if it is ever built (which is unlikely), could be between $8 billion and $30 billion. In other words, it is an expensive, pointless gesture to anti-immigrant feeling without addressing what an immigration policy could or should be.

167. Development of a coverup strategy to fight Congressional oversight that involves more than a little Karl Rove and obstruction of justice. In addition to the public relations campaign that there is nothing to see and they have cooperated anyway, we have:

1. Threatening witnesses (Chief of Staff to the Deputy Attorney General Michael Elston acting, he says, on Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty's orders to tell 3 of the 8 fired US attorneys to stay quiet or else)

2. Preventing witnesses from testifying (Condi Rice directing Simon Dodge not to testify about his early identification of the uranium from Niger for Iraq documents as fakes and Rice's knowledge of this as National Security Advisor)

3. Large but incomplete docudumps that are missing key information (for example, the November 15-December 4 email gap around the time that the US attorney firings were being finalized)

4. Attempted destruction of evidence and/or Claiming that evidence has been lost (Rove's deleted emails, Monica Goodling's instruction to remove older versions of files)

5. Slow response or non-response (the failure of Rice to answer written questions; dragging out the document production process)

6. Claims of executive privilege regardless of merit (to keep Karl Rove and Harriet Miers from testifying under oath or to block production of emails, even those on non-White House servers, and even after the assertion that Bush was not part of the firing process)

7. Coaching of testimony known to be false by the coachers (Karl Rove and Kyle Sampson misleading Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty into giving testimony that attorneys were fired for "performance" reasons, which Rove and Sampson knew to be false)

8. Testifying but with severe amnesia (Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, Lurita Doan)

9. Lying (as evidenced by Gonzales' numerous stories, Sampson misstating his role in the attorney firings, or Victoria Toensing in defining who is and is not a covert agent)

168. When Oregon Senator Gordon Smith was up for re-election in 2002, Dick Cheney working with Sue Ellen Wooldridge (Stephen Griles' current wife who was deputy chief of staff to Gale Norton at the Interior Department before moving on to Justice) moved to divert more water from the Klamath River for irrigation purposes to help the area's Republican farmers. In February 2002, Bush and Karl Rove announced their support for the idea. In March after a preliminary report by the National Academy of Sciences requested by Cheney, Interior's Gale Norton approved the diversion and quashed scientific views to the contrary. As a result, in the following months, water levels dropped resulting in a large die off of salmon but Senator Smith won his election. In March 2006, a federal judge put limits on the draw off in an attempt to protect Northwest fisheries.

169. Debra Wong Yang the US attorney for Central California (Los Angeles) left office on November 11, 2006 a month ahead of the more well known firings of 8 US attorneys on December 7, 2006. She had been investigating Representative Jerry Lewis. Part of this was an offshoot of USA-San Diego Carol Lam's investigation into Representative Duke Cunningham and defense contractor and briber Brent Wilkes. I say part because Jerry Lewis has been rated one of the most corrupt members of Congress. And then there are the interesting connections. The Cerberus group, for example, which gave large contributions to Lewis and his organizations, owns IAP the outfit involved in the Walter Reed scandal. As for Debra Yang, after resigning for "personal" reasons, she joined the law firm representing Lewis and received a highly unusual $1.5 million dollar signing bonus.

170. Nepotism Cheney-style. Although she had no background in Middle Eastern affairs, in the run up to the Iraq war in 2002, Elizabeth Cheney, Dick Cheney's daughter, was named to the newly created position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (where she could keep an eye on things for her father at a critical juncture in the fabrication of the case for war). She left in 2003 to work on her father's re-election campaign but returned after the election in 2005 as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and as such was the second ranking diplomat at State for the Middle East. She was Shaha Riza's boss when she came to State. She also headed the Iran-Syrian Operations Group (ISOG) with a budget of $80 million. This was a kind of reprise at State of what Douglas Feith's Office of Strategic Plans had been at the Pentagon. It was aimed at regime change in the two countries, especially Iran. She left State in 2006. She is married to Philip Perry, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security.

171. Dick "I had other priorities in the 60s than military service" Cheney received 5 deferments to avoid service in Vietnam. He did no more than what many did at the time. Still it is a very strange start for one who prides himself on being a superhawk and who views our relations with the rest of the world as a matter of will, and paranoia. As Vice President, he has been the extremist behind the throne, one of the few for whom 911 was a godsend because it furnished him the opportunity to realize his most radical tendencies. Unlike Karl Rove who believes in turning government into an extension of the Republican Party, Cheney believes in making government a direct extension of the President. And if that President is weak and uninvolved, well then all that accumulated power flows quite naturally to the next person in line who is more engaged, the Vice President say. Of course, Cheney will only use this power against our enemies. Unfortunately, he sees enemies everywhere.

....Cheney understands that sometimes lies must be used to serve a higher truth and that even after being exposed they still have power, hence the repetition of even the most thoroughly debunked assertions, like the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda or that the Vice Presidency is not part of the Executive Branch. It doesn't matter that they are untrue. They take up time and energy. They delay, misdirect, and confuse action on issues.

....While Cheney has been spectacularly successful in acquiring power, he has been a disaster in using it. The results are a preventive and preventable war in Iraq, domestic spying, welfare for the rich, largesse for Halliburton, a mania for secrecy, and a whittling away of Constitutional rights and safeguards, in other words a country less safe, more unequal, and less free.

172. Johnnie Burton, director of the Minerals Management Service since 2002 resigned May 7, 2007 after an Interior Inspector General report of December 2006. During her tenure, she reduced audits and depended on self-reporting by energy companies resulting in underreporting and underpayment of royalties. The first auditor Bobby Maxwell who noticed a problem had his job eliminated.

...As part of this, Burton also failed to review leases. Only 9% have been since 2000. In a particularly egregious case, approximately 1100 bungled oil and gas leases for the Gulf of Mexico dating from 1998-1999 which failed to tie royalties to changes in oil and gas prices were left unexamined for years and then not promptly addressed and renegotiated once they were known. The GAO estimates that $1 billion in royalty payments has been lost on these leases and that another $6.4 billion to $9.8 billion could go uncollected over their lifetime.

173. Punishment of defense counsel at Guantanamo for doing their jobs. Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift who won the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case which held that the Executive could not set up military tribunals on its own without approval by the Congress was forced out of the Navy JAG corps as a result. Major Michael Mori who defended Australian Guantanamo detainee David Hicks got for him a plea deal on March 26, 2007 whereby he was given 7 years all but 9 months of which were suspended and which he could serve in Australia. As a reward, Mori was passed over for promotion, offered remote postings, and rejected as a judge trainee. To date, 4 of 6 military defense attorneys up for promotion have been similarly passed over. Another Lieutenant Commodore Matthew Diaz has been convicted of giving secrets to the benefit of a foreign government for having given a list of Guantanamo detainees to a New York law firm the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2005. On May 18, 2007, he was sentenced to 6 months in the brig and discharge. At the time (before the Military Commissions Act), the Center had won the right in Rasul v. Bush to file habeas briefs on behalf of detainees but the US sought to block these by refusing to turn over the names and so preventing the detainees from getting legal representation. The US has fought such disclosure despite Rasul and even though it is obligated to release this information at least to the Red Cross under the Geneva Conventions and failure to do so is a violation of international law.

174. Despite backlogs and a 2005 budget that resulted in a $1.3 billion deficit, VA officials received $3.8 million in bonuses. About half a million went to officials who sat on the review boards giving out the bonuses.

175. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was recommended by the 911 Commission to make sure that in countering terrorism the privacy rights and civil liberties of Americans were respected. Established by law on December 17, 2004, it first met more than a year later on March 14, 2006. Its first public meeting was on December 5, 2006. Its 5 members currently are chosen by the President although there is currently legislation to make it an independent agency. The Board's chairwoman is Carol Dinkins a former law partner of Alberto Gonzales. Theodore Olson who argued Bush v. Gore is also a member. In its first report (2007) to Congress, the Administration made over 200 changes even after the final draft had been approved by the committee, resulting in the resignation of the one of the board members Lanny J. Davis.

176. Johnnie Frazier, the Commerce Department's Inspector General who is supposed to investigate and prevent this kind of thing, was found by the government's whistleblower agency the Office of Special Counsel to have wrongly demoted his top deputy, Edward Blansitt, and his chief counsel, Allison Lerner, after Blansitt refused to sign off on expenses Frazier incurred during an August 2006 junket to Boston and New York. When Frazier learned of the investigation, he sought to destroy emails concerning his activities. Additionally, Frazier's Deputy Assistant Inspector General Thomas Phan has filed a civil rights complaint against him charging harassment and has also sought an investigation by the OSC. Frazier is also facing an inquiry by the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency (PCIE).

177. In 2007, Bill Roderick the Acting Inspector General for the EPA tried to cut his staff of 360 by 60. They are tasked with making sure that the EPA enforces its pollution rules. Roderick cited potential budget cuts for the proposed reductions just before he got a $15,000 bonus.

178. Janet Rehnquist, daughter of the late Chief Justice, was Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services from August 2001 to March 2003. She replaced numerous senior staff including all six of her deputy inspector generals through involuntary retirements and reassignments. She delayed an audit of Florida's pension fund before the 2002 election in which the President's brother Jeb Bush was running for re-election. The audit would have shown that the fund had lost $300 million in the Enron collapse.

179. Karla Corcoran was strictly speaking a Clinton appointment having been made the Post Office's Inspector General in 1997. Nevertheless, she extends into the Bush era and no discussion of Inspector General misconduct would be complete without her. She resigned in August 2003. Her tenure was marked by "rampant waste, cronyism, questionable management and personnel practices, and substandard performance." Her office was incredibly inefficient in uncovering fraud and waste. On the other hand, she held really good parties bringing her whole staff of 750 to Washington once a year for a week at a cost of $1 million each time.

180. Russian scientists in conjunction with the World Wildlife Fund set up a meeting to discuss the problem of increased human-polar bear interactions. These have become more frequent and dangerous as the bears are forced out of their usual ranges due to the melting of arctic ice packs. A polar bear expert Craig Perham from the Fish and Wildlife Service was invited along by Margaret Williams of the WWF. Perham was told by the Interior Department in February 2007 that he could not talk about global warming at the meeting because it was not part of the agenda, even though the meeting had no agenda and global warming was the cause of the change in polar bear movements.

181. The American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund (AVCR) is a fake "voting rights" group created by Republicans to give "non-partisan" testimony on the dangers of that most Republican of obsessions and inexistent of problems, voter fraud. It was registered on March 17, 2005 and was the only voting rights group to testify 4 days later on March 21, 2005 in House hearings held by now convicted Representative Bob Ney on voting problems in Ohio in 2004. The group was put together by Thor Hearne, both national and Missouri counsel for the 2004 Bush campaign, and Missouri's Republican Senator Kit Bond. Like the Swiftboaters, this is another group with a highly partisan agenda masquerading as an impartial observer.

182. In 2000 the EPA announced plans to phase out over 4 years the gasoline additive MTBE which had been found to be contaminating ground water supplies. These were canceled when Bush took office. As a result, MTBE is still in use but, due to law suits against oil companies, state bans, and lack of Congressional agreement in 2005, its production is half of what it was.

183. On May 30, 2002 Attorney General John Ashcroft removed restrictions on domestic spying by the FBI in counterterrorism investigations, including political and religious groups without probable cause. Unsurprisingly, the FBI used its new powers (as it admitted on November 23, 2003) to spy on antiwar protesters.

184. On August 23, 2004, the Labor Department changed regulations contained in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 to raise the minimum salary (from $155 to $455/week) at which executive, administrative, and professional employees must be paid overtime. I expect the idea was that they should be happy to have a job and that there was no reason to go overboard and actually pay them for their work.

185. In a show of rare prescience, on May 6, 2002 George Bush voided the US signature on the treaty (signed by Clinton) establishing an International Criminal Court at the Hague and so set the US and its leaders effectively outside its jurisdiction.

186. On August 9, 2002, the Department of Health and Human Resources changed its medical privacy regulations. While patients were given the right to review and correct their medical records and not have medical information disclosed to their employers without their consent, doctors, hospitals, and healthcare providers could do so among themselves and with insurance companies for treatment and billing purposes. Pharmacies were also allowed to enter into agreements with drug companies to promote their brands to patients without disclosing this relationship.

187. The Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935 is one of those acts which no one has ever heard of and since its repeal in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 it is likely no one ever will. PUHCA kept regulated energy companies from moving into unregulated businesses and so placed limits on their size, activities, and abilities to manipulate markets. You might think that was a good idea after the 2000-2001 electricity debacle in California. The Bush Administration and a Republican Congress more responsive to lobbyists than facts disagreed.

188. May 24, 2007 Bush nominates James Holsinger as the next Surgeon General. Holsinger believes that homosexuality is a lifestyle not an orientation and that it is incompatible with Christian teaching. The Surgeon General is described as the nation's top health educator.

....On July 10, 2007, Richard Carmona Surgeon General from 2002 to 2006 testified that he had been muzzled by Bush political appointees and prevented from discussing stem cell research, emergency contraception, prison healthcare, mental health issues, and the effectiveness of abstinence only programs. He related that a report on the health effects of secondhand tobacco smoke was delayed for years and its conclusions weakened.

....A 2006 report on poverty and world health has still not been released as of July 2007 because of the efforts of William R. Steiger the 37 year old head of the Office of Global Health Affairs at Health and Human Services and godson of the elder Bush. Steiger has held the post since 2001 although he has no background in health or medical issues. Steiger criticized inaccuracies and lack of analysis in the report which was pre-read and well received by healthcare professionals. In fact, Steiger's real gripe was that the report did not promote Bush health policies. This is not the first time that Steiger has engaged in such behavior. In 2004, at the behest of food manufacturers and sugar producers, he sought changes in a health report on obesity.

189. In June 2007, Italia Federici agreed to plead guilty to tax evasion and obstructing a Congressional investigation. She was Jack Abramoff's go between for the Interior Department. She headed the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, a fake pro-business anti-environmental group created by Gale Norton (who went on to become Secretary of the Interior 2001-2006) and Grover Norquist. At the time of her Abramoff related activities, she was romantically involved with the Deputy Secretary of the Interior Stephen Griles who has also pled guilty to obstructing a Congressional investigation. Her sentence (~ 16 months) will depend on her cooperation.

190. Thomas Barnett entered the DOJ's antitrust division in April 2004 and became its head (assistant attorney general) on February 10, 2006. Barnett sent a memo to state prosecutors in May 2007 urging them to drop an investigation into a complaint by Google that Microsoft's new Vista operating system slowed Google's search engine in preference to Microsoft's own version. The Google complaint has its origins in a consent decree monitoring Microsoft's antitrust compliance. Before coming to the Justice Department, Barnett was the Vice Chair of the Antitrust and Consumer Protection Practice Group of Covington & Burling, the Washington law firm which had represented Microsoft in the antitrust proceedings. Barnett's efforts seem to have backfired for now, but not for want of trying on his part. On June 19, 2007, Microsoft agreed to modify Vista later this year to allow users to disable the Microsoft version and choose another search engine, thus solving the speed problem.

191. The Palestinian civil war. January 2006 the populist and rejectionist Hamas (one of the Islamist organizations that Israel had supported in the past as a counterweight to Fatah) wins Parliamentary elections pushing out of government a corrupt but well entrenched Fatah. Clashes between Fatah and Hamas militants begin almost immediately. Despite Bush's oft stated support of democracy in the Middle East, the US organizes a boycott of Hamas. The US and the Europeans cut off funds to the Palestinian Authority (PA). Israel holds back tax receipts. International banking transactions are blocked preventing aid from other countries. The result is a sharp increase in unemployment, poverty, and radicalism in the Territories, especially Gaza where Hamas is strongest. At the same time, the background pattern of Israeli and Palestinian attacks and counter-attacks continues. In the deepening humanitarian and political crisis, Western governments led by the US seek to do end runs around Hamas funneling aid directly to the Palestinian people bypassing the PA and backing the Fatah Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as an alternative to Hamas. In addition to political support, the US supplies Fatah security forces with weapons. A national unity government is finally cobbled together in February 2007 but doesn't last. In May, 500 Fatah fighters enter Gaza from Egypt with Israeli approval and Bush okays $40 million to train 4,000 troops directly under Abbas' control. Violence flares in June 2007 and greatly outnumbered and outgunned Fatah fighters are kicked out of Gaza. On June 14, 2007, Abbas dissolves the "national unity" government. A few days later on June 16, Fatah forces effectively expel Hamas from the West Bank. Instead of accepting the results of a democratic election and engaging with its opponents, the Bush Administration fomented a civil war. As has happened so many times before, it didn't do its homework or the math, and the consequences were once again not those it expected. The Palestinians are even weaker and more divided. Gaza has real potential to become a full blown humanitarian crisis. The situation is more dangerous and peace even further away.

192. Selling the war: Part 1. Iraq the reasons. Some say there was no reason for the war. This is untrue. Many reasons were given for it, just no good one. Here are a dozen of them grace of Bush, Cheney, the neocons from the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and the 2002 AUMF.

1. WMD

2. Saddam Hussein behind 9/11

3. Saddam Hussein connected with al Qaeda

4. Fighting terrorists there so we don't have to fight them here

5. Spread democracy

6. Saddam Hussein was a bad man

7. Iraqi violations of UN Resolutions

8. The 1993 assassination attempt against GHW Bush

9. Oil

10. Bases

11. Defend Israel

12. Bad intel

193. Selling the war: Part 2. Iraq the turning points. While enough for a pentadecagon, not enough to make a difference.

1. May 1, 2003 End of major combat operations announced on board the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln: Mission accomplished

2. July 22, 2003 Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusai killed

3. December 13, 2003 Saddam Hussein captured

4. March 8, 2004 Interim Constitution

5. June 28, 2004 Interim government formed/Sovereignty returned

6. November 2004 Second siege of Fallujah

7. January 30, 2005 First elections for transitional assembly

8. May 3, 2005 Transitional government formed

9. October 15, 2005 Vote on constitution

10. December 15, 2005 Elections for permanent assembly

11. April 22, 2006 Nuri al Maliki replaces interim PM Ibrahim Jaafari in forming a permanent government

12. May 20, 2006 Maliki presents permanent government: the key ministries of Defense, Interior, and National Security are left unfilled

13. June 7, 2006 Jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed; June 8, 2006 last ministries filled in permanent government (175 days after the elections)14. December 30, 2006 Saddam Hussein executed by hanging

15. January 10, 2007 Bush announces his New Way Forward plan, aka the "surge". Deployment of surge forces completed June 15, 2007. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General David Petraeus claim progress is being made.

194. Torture and Guantanamo

September 25, 2001, John Yoo at the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) writes a memo to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales in which he opines that in the war on terror the President's decisions are "for him alone and are unreviewable."

January 9, 2002, John Yoo together with Robert Delahunty assert in a memo to the Pentagon that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the Taliban and al Qaeda.

January 22, 2002, Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General and head of the OLC, communicates this finding to White House counsel Gonzales.

January 25, 2002, Gonzales sends a memo (written by David Addington) to George Bush in which he argues that the war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

January 26, 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell writes to Gonzales arguing that the Geneva Conventions should be applied to Taliban and al Qaeda whether or not there is a legal duty to do so.

January 27, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declares that Guantanamo detainees are not prisoners of war, i.e. not covered by the Geneva Conventions.

January 29, 2002, Bush agrees with Rumsfeld.

February 1, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft weighs in and agrees with Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, and Bush that the Geneva Conventions to do not apply to Taliban and al Qaeda detainees.

February 2, 2002, agreeing with Colin Powell, the State Department's top lawyer William Taft IV points out that non-observance of the Geneva Conventions could endanger American troops.

Febraury 7, 2002, Bush signs an executive order that says the Geneva Conventions do not apply to Taliban and al Qaeda detainees and further asserts his authority to suspend compliance with the Conventions in future conflicts.

February 26, 2002, it having been decided that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to Taliban and al Qaeda detainees, Jay Bybee further informs the Pentagon that these detainees have no protection against self incrimination since they are outside the purview of US courts.

August 1, 2002, Jay Bybee writes to Gonzales his now infamous memo (drafted by John Yoo with the help of then legal counsel to the VP David Addington and then deputy White House counsel Timothy Flanigan) in which he asserts that "Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

October 2002, officers at Guantanamo request permission to use "harsh interrogation techniques" (i.e. torture) on detainees.

November 4, 2002, Major General Geoffrey Miller takes command of the prison at Gunatanamo with a mandate to get actionable information from detainees.

November 27, 2002, Rumsfeld signs off on harsh interrogation techniques at Guantanamo.

January 15, 2003, Rumsfeld looking for greater legal cover both for himself and interrogators rescinds his order and directs Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes II to create a review panel to come up with new interrogation rules. Haynes chooses Air Force General Counsel Mary Walker to head the panel. (Walker's previous claim to fame was that she had been behind a coverup of sexual abuse scandals at the Air Force Academy.)

March-April 2003, Judge Advocate Generals of the Army, Navy, and Air Force protest the dumping of the Geneva Conventions and the well established doctrine of the UCMJ.

March 13, 2003, Jay Bybee confirmed as federal judge to the 9th circuit (West Coast) Court of Appeals.

March 14, 2003, Yoo delivers a memo to DOD General Counsel Haynes addressing issues before the Walker panel and is taken as the controlling legal opinion for it. The memo has, I believe, never been released.

April 4, 2003, the Walker panel accepts the definition of torture outlined in Bybee's August 2002 memo and okays harsh interrogation techniques.

April 16, 2003, Rumsfeld signs off on some of the recommended harsh interrogation techniques.

Summer 2003, John Yoo leaves the OLC and returns to UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law.

December 2003, things begin to unravel. The new head of the OLC Jack Goldsmith (although he had worked for DOD General Counsel Haynes) informs his former boss that the March 2003 Yoo memo is under review and "should not be relied upon for any purpose."

July 14, 2004, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the OLC (acting head) Patrick Philbin in Congressional testimony puts the onus back on the Secretary of Defense saying that harsh interrogation techniques must be conducted "in accordance with the limitations and safeguards specified by the Secretary," and that the President's Article II powers as Commander in Chief can not be used as a justification.

December 2004, General Craddock head of Southern Command appoints Air Force Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt to investigate FBI allegations of torture at Guantanamo. He finds abuses and recommends that Major General Geoffrey Miller be held accountable and admonished, a recommendation which General Craddock who had been Rumsfeld's senior military assistant rejects.

February 4, 2005, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the OLC Daniel Levin writes to DOD General Counsel Haynes reminding him again of both Goldsmith's opinion and Philbin's testimony. He informs Haynes that the March 2003 Yoo memo has been formally withdrawn.

March 17, 2005, Haynes rescinds the Walker panel report based on the March 2003 Yoo memo and sanctioning harsh interrogation techniques, writing "I determine that the Report of the Working Group on Detainee Interrogations is to be considered a historical document with no standing in policy, practice, or law to guide any activity of the Department of Defense."

December 30, 2005, Bush signs into law the 2006 Defense Appropriations bill which contains the McCain Detainee Treatment Act which ostensibly limits harsh interrogation techniques. The act is weakened by the Kyl-Levin amendment which allows evidence gained by torture and restricts habeas corpus rights of detainees to challenge their treatment. Bush completely vitiates the provision by appending a signing statement which states that the President will abide by its limitations, if he feels like it.

October 17, 2006, Bush signs the Military Commissions Act into law. It immunizes torturers retroactively to November 26, 1997.

July 20, 2007, in accordance with the Military Commissions Act, Bush signs an Executive order allowing the CIA to engage in aggressive interrogation techniques but without specifying what they are claims that these will not amount to torture.

195. Torture and Iraq

March 2003, Stephen Cambone is made Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

Summer 2003, Stephen Cambone almost certainly with Rumsfeld's blessing sends Lt. General William G. (Jerry) Boykin to Guantanamo to see Major General Miller about prisons in Iraq. Boykin a born again Christian gained a reputation for his anti-Islamic remarks. He is currently the Deputy Undersecretary for Intelligence at the DOD.

Aug. 31-Sept. 9, 2003, Miller goes to Iraq and Abu Ghraib where he recommends that prisons become part of the intelligence gathering process. Per Brig. General Janis Karpinski commandant of Abu Ghraib, Miller pushes to gitmo-ize the prison. Miller later denies this.

October-December 2003, period of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib.

January 13, 2004, Army Spec. Joseph M. Darby, an MP with the 800th at Abu Ghraib, leaves a disc with photographs of prisoner abuse on the bed of a military investigator.

February 26, 2004, Major General Antonio Taguba issues a classified report on the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

April 28, 2004, Sixty Minutes II airs the photos after a 2 week delay, setting off an international firestorm.

April 30, 2004, Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib appears online; Major General Geoffrey Miller is picked to replace Janis Karpinski and oversee detainee operations in Iraq.

Early May 2004, the Taguba report is leaked.

May 6, 2004, Taguba meets with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who professes ignorance of his report, asks whether torture occurred, and claims not to have seen the photos from Abu Ghraib although 4 months have passed from the initial report and more than 2 months from the in house release of Taguba's report.

May 7, 2004, Rumsfeld testifies before the Senate and professes surprise and ignorance of events at Abu Ghraib. He does name Joseph Darby for the first time as the one who notified authorities about the abuse. Darby subsequently received death threats and he and his family had to enter protective military custody.

The aftermath: Despite numerous reports, no attempt was made to investigate up the military chain of command or the civilian political leadership of the Pentagon and the White House. So far, about a dozen enlistees have been convicted of various Abu Ghraib related offenses. One special forces officer Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan is facing charges. Colonel Thomas Pappas who ran the intelligence section where the abuses occurred received a reprimand. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski was demoted and some of her underlings were also reprimanded. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez the military commander in Iraq retires without his extra star. And, of course, Major General Antonio Taguba who did his duty in a professional manner was forced to retire as of January 1, 2007, no sir, can't have people behaving like that in this Administration.

196. Vice President Cheney's bizarre assertion that the Office of the Vice President (OVP) is not part of the Executive Branch. (If it isn't, where does it fit in our Constitutional system, or does it?) As a result, since 2003, he has unilaterally exempted his office from compliance with Executive Order 12958 which requires information about its classification and declassification activities be provided to the National Archives so that national security materials can be safeguarded. In 2004, the OVP blocked an on-site inspection by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) part of the National Archives. In mid 2006, the ISOO wrote to Cheney's Chief of Staff David Addington twice on the subject but received no answer. In January 2007, the ISOO asked Alberto Gonzales and the DOJ to resolve the matter. Cheney's response was to seek to abolish the ISOO and eliminate the National Archives' ability to refer disputes to the DOJ.

....Additionally, in 2001 the OVP refused to tell the GAO as part of its oversight function who had participated in Cheney's Energy Task Force. This was a governmental request and is different from the Sierra Club lawsuit. (The GAO sued but the case was dismissed by a compliant conservative judge John D. Bates on the grounds that the GAO lacked standing and that the matter fell outside the purview of the court.) Cheney has also refused to disclose travel paid for by special interests as required by law. Since 2004, he has denied requests to name the political appointees on his staff. He has asserted control over Secret Service documents which detail visitors to his residence and exempted these from Freedom of Information requests. Finally, per Executive Order 13233 of November 2001, the Vice President is given authority to prevent public release of his (the OVP's) papers after he leaves office.

197. Another wrinkle on the US attorney scandal. On June 22, 2007, Bill Mercer Acting Associate Attorney General (from September 2006) withdrew his nomination for the permanent No. 3 position at the DOJ 4 days before his confirmation hearings. Mercer has been US attorney for Montana since April 20, 2001. In June 2005, he was given a second position as Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General in Washington. On October 20, 2005, US District Chief Judge Donald Molloy of Billings informed Attorney General Gonzales that Mercer was in violation of federal law since he no longer lived in the district. On November 10, 2005, Gonzales wrote back to the judge stating that Mercer still had a domicile there, returned on a regular basis, and would return permanently as soon as his "temporary" assignment was finished. The same day at Mercer's request, Brett Tolman (who had snuck in the interim US attorney language into the Patriot Act extension) inserted a second provision which allowed US attorneys to live outside their districts and hold other jobs. Mercer's confirmation hearing would have raised embarrassing questions about his role as an absentee US attorney and changing the language in the Patriot Act. His name also appeared in emails concerning the US attorney firings. He has stated his intention to return to his US attorney position in Montana.

198. On June 19, 2007, John Rizzo testified in confirmation hearings for the position of CIA General Counsel. Rizzo has been Acting Counsel for the last 3 years and is a 30 year veteran of the agency. He has also served as Senior Deputy General Counsel and as Deputy General Counsel for Operations. This means that he was part of or headed the CIA legal team that gave guidance to CIA personnel at the time that the CIA was engaged in running black prisons, conducting kidnappings and renditions to countries that practiced torture, and using interrogation methods that amounted to torture. In this last regard, there is the question of an unreleased August 2002 memo (not the Bybee one) from Justice to the CIA listing approved interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, hypothermia, refusal of pain medication for injuries, sleep deprivation, light and sound bombardment, and forced positions for prolonged periods of time. At his hearings, Rizzo described the CIA's interrogation program based on the 2002 memo as humane. He also didn't deny that the CIA could kidnap an American citizen overseas, saying only that it would be "extremely problematic". In other words, Rizzo is a classic enabler of policy no matter how dubious or illegal that policy is.

199. The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) is another obscure governmental body that has no reason to exist. Created in 2000, its nine members (actually still two short at seven) were not appointed until 2004, and it was not funded until 2005. Meant to cut down on unnecessary classification, it has to date made no recommendation to declassify anything. Most recently, a Senate attempt to declassify the Intelligence Committee's report on pre-Iraq war assessments of WMD, including Ahmed Chalabi's input into them hit a brick wall when members sought to go through the PIDB. The PIDB noted that it could only consider a request to declassify if it originated with the President. This is a classic Catch-22. If a President classified something and wanted it kept classified, he/she would not make such a request. If the President wanted something declassified, it is unclear why he/she would bother going through the PIDB. So why does the PIDB exist?

200. On June 28, 2007, the Supreme Court 5-4 in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 eliminated the use of racial classification to avoid racial segregation in public schools. Its version of color blindness is to ignore the effects of past discrimination. The ruling is another indication that the two Bush appointees Roberts and Alito have no intention of honoring stare decisis (respect for precedent) which they swore to uphold at their confirmation hearings. It effectively undermines the 1954 landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka by leaving school districts few or no options to address and prevent segregation or re-segregation in their educational systems.

....The pattern of the Roberts court with respect to precedent is becoming clear. Using a majority of 5 conservative judges: Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy, the court has embarked on a course to overturn hallmark decisions like Roe and Brown, not by direct reversal but by dismantling them piece by piece until all the meaning in them is gone. It has also sought to roll back other laws and time elsewhere as well. In doing so, its reasoning has been remarkable for its inconsistency. This is Bush's court and with Iraq it may well be his most enduring and pernicious legacy.

201. On May 29, 2007, SCOTUS decided 5-4 in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc. that Ledbetter had only 180 days to file an EOCC complaint of salary discrimination based on sex and that although the discrimination had been going on for years, the court would consider only wage discrimination that had occurred within 180 days of her filing.

....It further stipulated the unrealistic and onerous condition that "Ledbetter should have filed an EEOC charge within 180 days after each allegedly discriminatory employment decision was made and communicated to her." This was an example of the Court ignoring how the world actually functions. Corporations often prohibit employees from discussing their remuneration and make doing so grounds for dismissal. Employees may not come to know that they are being discriminated against for some time, what means are available to challenge such discrimination, if it is worth their while to contest it, and if they have the courage to do so. The decision greatly reduces the scope of discrimination claims and effectively gives corporations a Get Out of Jail Free card for patterns of long term discrimination.

202. On June 25, 2007, SCOTUS decided 5-4 in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. that corporations could use their general funds to run "issue" oriented ads, even those naming candidates, within 30 days of a federal primary election or 60 days of a federal general election in contradiction of requirements of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. This is a continuation of the infamous dictum that money equals free speech. Apparently SCOTUS thinks there isn't sufficient money in our political system or that it is not sufficiently bought. Another interesting aspect of the case is that the specific timeframe in question occurred during the 2004 election cycle and had long been rendered moot. Nevertheless, it was resurrected by invoking the notion that the controversy was capable of repetition, yet evading review. In other words, the Court will, if it wants to and regardless of the facts, look at a case long over (as here), take a very restricted view of time limits as in Ledbetter, or declare it moot as in Padilla.

203. On June 25, 2007, SCOTUS decided 5-4 in Morse et al v. Frederick that a school principal acted appropriately in confiscating a banner from a student which read Bong Hits 4 Jesus because it appeared to advocate drug use in violation of school policy. The decision confirmed the view that SCOTUS has a solid majority of prigs who were never teenagers and were born with their sense of humor and proportion permanently disconnected. SCOTUS did not have to take up this case but, having done so, it did not need to be so mindlessly Victorian about it. Curiously, while the Court was eager to rush to protect children's Fourteenth Amendment rights in the Seattle/Louisville case, it showed little regard for their First Amendment rights in Morse v. Frederick. Go figure.

204. On June 28, 2007, SCOTUS decided 5-4 in Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., DBA Kay's Kloset . . . Kay's Shoes that a manufacturer/distributor can fix the minimum price at which its goods can be sold by a retailer. The theory championed by Robert Bork among others is that by giving a manufacturer/distributor more control of its brand (including its price) it can better protect its brand. Putting it another way, by reducing competition within a brand, competition can be encouraged between brands. Such an approach may have some validity in high end niche markets for limited periods of time, but the key here is that it only may have a beneficial effect (albeit a highly restricted one) not that it will have one. Under such circumstances, is a potential, ephemeral advantage really worth undermining the Sherman Anti-Trust Act with its well understood and well accepted ban on price fixing? The current hyper-conservative (and extremely activist) Court thinks so.

Once again, so much for stare decisis.

205. A no bid Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contract to the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton beginning in May 2003 ballooned over 4 years from $2 million to $124 million. This is part of the saga of the privatizing of intelligence services and the ongoing mismanagement and incompetence at DHS. It was presided over by Cheney crony and Booz Allen Vice President James Woolsey. When the contract (now split into 5 parts) was finally put up for bid by DHS, Booz Allen won them all. You have to wonder what message DHS was trying to send by rewarding those who had effectively screwed them over.

206. April 28, 2006, HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson stated in a speech that he cancelled a contract with a minority advertising firm because the contractor had said he did not support Bush. Later, Jackson in the face of mounting criticism said he made the story up. However, his chief of staff testified (as part of an Inspector General's investigation) that Jackson had intervened in the contracting process when contractors had known Democratic ties. In keeping with the pattern of tame IGs who permeate the Bush bureaucracy, the HUD IG downplayed the issue by saying, "there were some limited instances where political affiliation may have been a factor in contract issues involving Jackson." Even if limited, such instances violate department policies and more importantly violate the law by establishing a political test, something that neither Jackson nor his IG seem to have any problems with.

207. Donald Rumsfeld Defense Secretary from 2001-2006, master of Shock and Awe and Abu Ghraib, famously said on December 8, 2004, "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." This was in response to a question about raiding garbage dumps to cobble together armor for flimsily protected Humvees. The problem was that this was over two years from when the buildup to the Iraq invasion began and over a year and a half after Bush's Mission Accomplished speech declared major hostilities over. At the same time, Pentagon spokesmen defended Rumsfeld saying that he was not involved on a day to day basis with Iraq due to his work on the Pentagon's quadrennial review. In other words, he was too busy with the Army he wished to have as opposed to the one he had or the one he needed for Iraq. This was all supposed to result in "force transformation" of the military into small, light but lethal units for future wars, again the very opposite of the no frills but numerous boots on the ground that General Shinseki had correctly predicted were needed for Iraq. Rumsfeld's treatment of Shinseki sent a clear message to the uniformed military that they could agree with Rumsfeld and his minions or else. This was a sure guarantee for compliant generals and bad military advice.

....Rumsfeld also took on the Pentagon's arcane and antiquated procurement process. Under his leadership, he made a bloated and inefficient system even more so. Examples can be found here (An excellent resource for waste in government and in the Pentagon in particular.)

....Rumsfeld ran the gamut from arrogantly dismissive to insincerely reflective. He told us that he not only knew that Saddam had WMD but he knew where they were. On March 30, 2003, he assured us, "They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." When massive, uncontrolled looting broke out in Baghdad, his response on April 11, 2003 was "Stuff happens" and "freedom is untidy." Yet in his October 16, 2003 memo to General Myers, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and General Peter Pace, victory which he continued to believe in to the end had already become "a long, hard slog." Such an admission might have been expected to lead to a certain belated humility or at least a change in policy, but in the event it resulted in neither.

....Rumsfeld could be unintentionally revealing, "illustrative" he would call it, as when he opined, "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." While comically convoluted, in the end he missed the point. It was not all the knowns that were the problem. It was what he thought he knew and didn't that was. Long after the insurgency got started Rumsfeld was still talking about "deadenders". By the time Rumsfeld got around to admitting the insurgency's existence, Iraq was already well on its way to civil war. Rumsfeld couldn't see past his preconceptions. He punished those who disagreed with them. The result was he was constantly behind the curve addressing issues that had moved on.

....In his list of accomplishments which he left at the Pentagon before leaving, Rumsfeld cites the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the training and equipping of 131,000 Iraqi Ministry of Defense and 180,000 Iraqi Ministry of Interior forces as number one and two. Guantanamo is number four. Can anything be more telling? One country in civil war, another trending that way, a shell army, a cover for militias and death squads, and an international human rights controversy, these are what Rumsfeld without irony points to as his monuments.

208. January 10, 2003, the Bush administration issues guidelines that would exempt up to twenty million acres of "isolated" wetlands and seasonal streams from protection under the Clean Water Act (CWA). This went to court and in Rapanos v. United States June 19, 2006, Kennedy's opinion was controlling but his definition of what constituted wetlands was unclear. He defined them as those that "alone or in combination with similarly situated lands in the region, significantly affect the chemical, physical, and biological integrity" of the navigable waters covered by the CWA. However, land adjacent to non-navigable tributaries must be decided on a case by case basis. This was a recipe for regulatory mayhem. In September 2006, draft guidelines prepared by the EPA and the Corps of Engineers to address the issues raised by SCOTUS were pulled at the urging of big coal, developers, and cattle ranchers. They were reworked by the White House's Council on Environmental Quality and re-issued in June 2007 to track more closely with commercial concerns.

209. As with wetlands, a goal of the Bush Administration has been to open up all federally held lands and resources to commercial exploitation, no matter how short term, no matter now destructive. A case in point is the Roadless Rule.

January 12, 2001, in the last days of Bill Clinton's Presidency, the Roadless Rule is published in the Federal Register. It prohibits roadbuilding in 58.5 million acres of roadless wilderness. This accounts for about 1/3 of the nation's forests.

February 5, 2001, Agriculture Secretary Anne Veneman suspends the Roadless Rule.

December 12, 2002, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upholds the Roadless Rule overturning an Idaho challenge to it.

December 23, 2002, the Bush Administration announces plans to give governors the right to seek exemptions to the Roadless Rule.

June 9, 2003, Undersecretary for Natural Resources and the Environment Mark Rey repeats the Administration's intention to change the Roadless Rule to grant governors waivers to it.

December 23, 2002, the 17 million acres (about 4% of which is old growth) of Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the planet's largest temperate rainforest, is exempted from the Roadless Rule.

July 12, 2004, Ann Veneman proposes a new rule which would give governors an 18 month window in which to petition the US Forest Service to open up "roadless" areas to roadbuilding to facilitate logging and drilling for gas and oil.

May 13, 2005, Bush issues the new rule allowing state petitions.

August 5, 2005, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals blocks the Tongass National Forest management plan and bars roadbuilding pending revision of it.

August 28, 2005, several states and environmental groups sue and the case is assigned to federal District Judge for Northern California Elizabeth Laporte.

September 20, 2006, Judge Laporte reinstates the Roadless Rule nationwide with the exception of the Tongass National Forest.

February 6, 2007, Judge Laporte enjoins roadbuilding in conjunction with drilling permits and leases issued since May 2005.

April 9, 2007, the Forest Service with the timber industry appeal Judge Laporte's decision to the 9th Circuit.

After 6 years, the Administration has neither given up on nor cut back on its plans. It goes to show how singleminded and persistent the Bush Administration is. The Roadless Rule is popular and supported by most Americans. We would like to see some of our national patrimony preserved both for ourselves and future generations. This has not caused the Administration to hesitate for a second in its attempts to overturn it. Only the efforts of states and environmental groups in the courts have kept them so far from succeeding.

210. The invocation of national security can be used to cover so many faults. On March 6, 2006, there was a leak of 35 liters of highly enriched uranium at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin, Tennessee. If this material had pooled anywhere to a depth of a few inches, a nuclear reaction would have ensued with subsequent release of radiation and potential for (non-nuclear) explosion and fire. As it was, the plant was closed for 7 months. Neither the public nor the Congress was informed until an annual report 13 months later in April 2007. As a result of the accident, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) modified the facility's license in a confirmatory order dated February 21, 2007. By law, such a change requires a period of public comment but the notice for public comment was itself stamped Official Use Only and not made public. This was pursuant to a memo of August 24, 2004 in which all correspondence whether sensitive or not (including the memo stating this policy) was to be kept out of public view. After talks with staff from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, the NRC agreed to re-release its order for public comment.

211. How it gets done. Back in the 1990s, the state of Utah challenged the Bureau of Land Management's grant of interim protection from mining, drilling, and logging on 2.6 million acres of the San Rafael Swell pending a Congressional decision on whether it would receive wilderness status. In 1998, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Utah on all but one count of its complaint and the suit became moribund. That should have been the end of it. But in 2003, Utah Governor Mike Leavitt and Interior Secretary Gale Norton came to an agreement. In March 2003, Utah amended its complaint re-opening the suit and on April 11, 2003, the Bush Administration settled it on Utah's terms. It did this by capping wilderness areas at the 22 million acres already so designated, effectively excluding the San Rafael Swell and opening it up to commercial exploitation. On August 11, 2003, Bush nominated Leavitt for the post of Administrator at the EPA. Leavitt had no experience in the field but he had helped out in the Utah deal and favored in general the Bush policy on the environment of voluntary controls and weakened oversight. He was confirmed October 28, 2003 and served 2 years before replacing Tommy Thompson at Health and Human Services.

212. That compassionate conservative thing. December 19, 2002 the White House's Office of Management and Budget instructs EPA to value the lives of senior citizens at 63 percent that of younger Americans when calculating the costs and benefits of air pollution regulations. The result decreases, of course, the benefits side of the equation and weakens the case for regulation.

213. A June 27, 2007 report by the Department of Defense Inspector General detailed two companies Force Protection and Armor Holdings awarded single source contracts worth $2 billion dollars to deliver armor kits for Humvees and other vehicles used in Iraq. The armor was not adequately tested, delivered late, and often contained unusable or missing parts. The contract was let despite the fact that other suppliers were available and could have competed for the work.

214. A whiff of hypocrisy. July 9, 2007, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) releases a statement admitting to using the DC Madam's (Deborah Palfrey) Escort Service. Vitter is a "family values" social conservative against abortion and gay marriage and for abstinence only programs. Vitter's admission came after the release of telephone records and an investigation funded by Hustler's Larry Flynt which showed that Vitter had used the escort service at least 5 times between 1999 and 2001.

215. On July 12, 2007, the GAO released a follow up to a 2003 report. It found that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's licensing procedures for radioactive materials remained ineffective. GAO investigators incorporated a bogus company, got a post office box in West Virginia (one of 16 states which does not handle such applications), submitted an application for a radioactive materials license directly to the NRC, received it within 28 days, modified it, and were able to successfully approach two companies which sold road testing equipment containing americium-241 and cesium-137. The exercise was to see how easy it would be to get materials for a "dirty bomb." The NRC downplayed the threat but changed its procedures. It now requires face to face visits with applicants from unfamiliar companies (a recommendation from the 2003 report). The GAO also recommended in 2006 that the NRC take steps to prevent counterfeiting and modification of licenses. It is unclear what is being down on this front.

216. Hedge funds buy companies, make some changes, and then sell them or their parts off at a vast profit. Their managers receive enormous compensations (hundreds of millions) for this which are not taxed as income but at the much lower rates of capital gains (max 15%). That is not the end of it. One hedge fund Blackstone recently went public to the tune of $4.75 billion for its managers. On this, they paid $553 million in taxes, most of it at the 15% rate. It does not end here. Managers maintain that their going public represented a sale of $3.7 billion worth of the company's brand identity (called its "good will") and are currently claiming deductions based on the depreciation of the Blackstone brand (for going public), not at the 15% capital gains rate but at the much higher 35% income tax rate. Over 15 years, this deduction will result in a return of $750 million to them or $197 million more than what they originally paid in taxes. We will end up paying them for taking their company public and for the huge profit they made doing so. The rich are not like us, and neither are the laws that cover them.

217. More how it gets done. Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) is the 9th largest defense contractor and is an integral part of the military-industrial complex. Its board and upper ranks are filled with heavy hitters from the military and intelligence communities who use the revolving door to cycle back and forth between the company and government. It is a convenient arrangement. Not only does the company have easy access to contracts with either little or no bidding but it has inbuilt protection against its failures and misdeeds. The result is no matter how badly a job is bungled penalties vary from minimal to non-existent. The costs to the nation's security as a result of such boondoggles are large but unquantifiable. A few examples:

The NSA needed a computer system to process and manage the huge number of communications it monitors. SAIC got a $280 million contract and 26 months to develop the system called Trailblazer. 4 years and a billion dollars later with no program in sight, the NSA finally pulled the plug it. But since it still needed the system, the NSA relet the contract which was again won by SAIC this time for $361 million.

SAIC was also behind the FBI's disastrous program to computerize its case and filing system into a single integrated database. The contract was worth $124 million. After 3 years the Virtual Case File as it was called didn't work and was abandoned.

From 1993 to 2002, David Kay was at SAIC where he became director of its Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis. He was a major promoter of the idea that Iraq had large WMD programs and championed the case for the Second Gulf War. In 2003-2004, he ran the hunt for WMD in Iraq. When none were found, he said on January 28, 2004 that "it turns out that we were all wrong." But it really wasn't "we", but those like Kay who had pressed the case so hard by ignoring what evidence there was and relying instead on highly dubious sources produced by the likes of Ahmed Chalabi. When Bush appointed a commission to investigate what had happened, three of those on the commission had ties to SAIC. Naturally no fingers were pointed SAIC's or Kay's way and no conflict of interest concerns were raised.

The SAIC story emblematic of so many companies represents the problems and dangers of outsourcing essential services to private contractors. The results are sweetheart deals, cost overruns, delays, systems that don't work, and very, very little accountability. Companies that do this kind of work and those that run them wrap themselves in a patriotic flag even as they loot the nation's treasury and weaken its security with shoddy products that don't work.

218. The MRAP case. As early as December 2003, a need was seen for heavier vehicles than the Humvee in Iraq (MRAPs) that could withstand and deflect IED blasts. Rumsfeld's emphasis on force transformation and lighter, faster vehicles; his punitive and dictatorial management style; the Pentagon's institutional slowness; the usual pitfalls with contracting, generals unwilling to risk their careers by disagreeing with Rumsfeld; the Pentagon's year in year out insistence that troop levels would soon be reduced, all these things delayed MRAPs being made a priority for 3 1/2 years (until May 2007 when Secretary Gates made it one). It is estimated that since December 2003 when the need was first noted about 30% of US combat deaths in Iraq have come from the lack of such vehicles.

219. Another emasculation of oversight. The Intelligence Oversight Board is a civilian intelligence oversight panel created in the 1970s with the purpose of notifying the President and the Attorney General of intelligence activities which it deems to be illegal. During the first two years of the Bush Administration, the board was vacant. During the first 5 1/2 years (2001-2006), the board made no notifications --this was while the FBI was playing fast and loose with NSLs, the CIA was engaged in torture and black prisons, and the NSA was conducting massive warrantless wiretapping.

220. These are the people protecting you. The Department of Homeland Security outsources many security duties to private contractors like the Wackenhut Corporation. This included the DHS headquarters in Washington at least until numerous security breaches were reported there. The worst and wackiest of these involved an anthrax scare where Wackenhut officials took what was called a suspicious white powder into Secretary Chertoff's office and disposed of it by dumping it out the window.

221. In the ongoing saga of Rove inspired Hatch Act violations, before the November 2006 elections drug czar John Walters and his deputies traveled at government expense to some 20 political events for at risk Republican candidates where federal grants and actions benefiting their districts were announced. The violation is that government funds are not to be spent for political purposes, and, as a natural extension of this, (un-elected) government officials acting in their official capacities are not to engage in partisan activities.

222. President Bush has promised to veto an extension of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). This program afforded some medical coverage to 6.9 million children in 2006. Its purpose is to cover children from families making more than the cutoff for Medicaid eligibility but not enough to afford private insurance. The proposal which has provoked the veto threat would increase the limit from 200% to 300% of the Medicaid cutoff and cover an additional 3.3 million children. It would be paid for by increasing the cigarette tax to $1 per pack. Over 5 years, program costs would increase from $35 billion to $60 billion (in other words ~$12 billion/year or about what is being spent for a single month of the Iraq war in 2007). Bush contends that this would cause the poor to shift from (expensive) private plans to the more affordable SCHIP program, showing that Bush is more interested in the health of insurance companies than in that of the nation's children.

223. How it is done up North. In December 2006, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) bought a $300,000 property along the Kenai River from a major campaign contributor Bob Penney for $179,400. After the story refused to go away, Murkowski announced in July 2007 that she would sell back the property at the original price.

....Meanwhile in 2000 Senator Ted "Slow Toobz" Stevens had renovations to his house doubling its size paid for by Veco an oil services company. On July 30, 2007, the FBI and IRS raided the Stevens home. Stevens also steered $558,000 to a former aide Trevor McCabe for the purchase of property near one of his pet projects, the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward. This sale is under investigation by the FBI and the Interior Department. McCabe is also a business partner of Stevens' son Ben a former state senator who is himself under investigation for how federal grants to the seafood industry were distributed.

....Finally, Representative Don Young agreed to return only part of $5,500 in illegal campaign contributions, the part on which the statute of limitations had not run out. Also Young is being investigated for a yearly pork roast hosted for 10 years by Veco CEO Bill Allen which was used to funnel money to Young in exchange for contracts. Allen recently pled guilty to federal bribery and conspiracy charges.

224. 44 former state Attorney Generals signed a petition of July 13, 2007 addressed to the Chairs of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees asking for a full review of the investigation, prosecution, sentencing, and detention of former Democratic Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Siegelman was convicted of re-appointing healthcare executive Richard Scrushy to a hospital board in exchange for a $500,000 donation to a lottery campaign. The government sought 30 years but, on conviction, he was sentenced to 7 years 4 months. Despite not being a flight risk and having substantial grounds for appeal, he was immediately remanded into custody.

....There is more than a hint that the prosecution was politically motivated. A lawyer Dana Jill Simpson working on Republican Bob Riley's gubernatorial campaign submitted an affidavit describing a 2002 conference call in which a top GOP strategist Bill Canary said Karl Rove had promised him that the Department of Justice would go after Siegelman. In the event, an investigation was begun by US Attorney Leura Canary, Bill Canary's wife. She recused herself only after objections were raised by Siegelman's attorneys. The case was taken over by Acting US Attorney Louis V. Franklin who claimed he decided "independently" to pursue an investigation which had already been going on for months.

225. Another heckuva job. Trying to avoid legal liability, FEMA lawyers banned the testing of 120,000 trailers purchased to house Katrina victims for high levels of formaldehyde, a carcinogen. The Sierra Club did test dozens of trailers and found formaldehyde levels high enough in 83% of them that would have required federal workers to wear respirators if they were exposed all day to it. 60,000 of the trailers are still in use.

226. The DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued a memorandum of July 10, 2007 declaring that Harriet Miers had been absolutely immunized by the White House from responding to a subpoena to appear and testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The basis of the opinion goes to the sloppy and disdainful way in which the Bush Administration responds to legal challenges. The Attorney General delegates authority to the Assistant Attorney General of the OLC to issue these kinds of opinions to agencies within the Executive branch. The Assistant Attorney General (AAG) of the OLC may in turn delegate this authority but must supervise the delegated work. As it is, Gonzales has recused himself from matters pertaining to the US Attorney firings. So the opinion should have been given by the AAG of the OLC, but here's the catch.

....The opinion was signed by Steven Bradbury. Bradbury was made acting AAG and nominated twice to be made permanent AAG. However, the Senate returned his nomination to the President more than 210 days before the issuance of the memo. (They did so by the way because of Bradbury's role in justifying the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. The quashed OPR probe mentioned in item 92 also involved possible wrongdoing by Bradbury and the OLC.)

....Pursuant to Title5 of the US Code 3346(b)(2)(B): "if a second nomination for the office is submitted to the Senate after the rejection, withdrawal, or return of the first nomination, the person serving as the acting officer may continue to serve . . . for no more than 210 days after the second nomination is rejected, withdrawn, or returned." So Bradbury was no longer acting AAG of the OLC and had no authority to issue the opinion. What this means is that the White House has asserted a vast and absolute Executive privilege based on a legal rationale that has as much legal force as if you, me, or your neighbor's dog had written it.

227. The House and Senate can vote a statutory contempt citation if the conditions of a subpoena are not met. By law, the contempt citation is then referred to the US Attorney for the District of Columbia "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action." With regard to citations in response to claims of Executive privilege in the US Attorney firings scandal, unnamed Administration officials have asserted that the Congress has no power to force the Department of Justice through the US Attorney for DC to convene a grand jury and pursue charges of contempt. They are basing this position on an untested May 30, 1984 opinion by then head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Theodore Olson. Olson argued that since the Executive executes the laws in specific cases, it is an infringement of the separation of powers that Congress should substitute its judgment for the Executive's and direct it to apply a law against any specific individual. He then seeks to marry this concept to the situation of an individual receiving a contempt citation from the Congress in an Executive privilege case. According to Olson, prosecutorial discretion allows the Executive to decline to pursue such a case.

....What Olson is really arguing, however, is not separation of powers but that the Executive is an independent power.

"The Executive's exclusive authority to prosecute violations of the law gives rise to the corollary that neither the Judicial nor the Legislative Branches may directly interfere with the prosecutorial discretion of the Executive by directing the Executive Branch to prosecute particular individuals." p.115

As such, the Executive is unaccountable to anyone in how the laws are executed, except in the broadest terms I suppose of election, funding, and impeachment. Olson's argument also assumes the duties of US Attorneys are identical with the interests of the Executive, which in practice are those of the sitting President. If this view were to be accepted, US Attorneys would cease to be agents of the law and become agents of a particular President and his/her agenda. In other words, they would become political not legal officers. It was precisely the Administration's attempts to erase this difference which produced the Attorney firings scandal in the first place.

228. Political appointees serve at most until a change in Administrations. Civil service employees are forever. Matthew McKeown, a protege of current Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne, was appointed to the Solicitor's Office at Interior in 2001. McKeown was also an associate of the now convicted Stephen Griles and his wife Sue Ellen Wooldridge. In 2005, he followed Wooldridge to the DOJ and its environmental division where he remained until July 2007. McKeown has backed Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative (see item 72) and in 2004, he called the Endangered Species Act hospice care at a convention of the Property Rights Foundation. On July 23, 2007, he was hired into the career civil service position of deputy associate solicitor at Interior meaning he and his ideas will be there long after Bush is gone.

229. On October 24, 2006, the night before John Brownlee the US Attorney for the Western District of Virginia completed a plea bargain with Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, he received a phone call from Michael Elston Chief of Staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty who urged him to go slow. Elston was acting on behalf of a Purdue Pharma executive and was contacted by Mary Jo White a former US Attorney representing Purdue Pharma. It is unlikely that Elston acted without McNulty's knowledge.

....The Oxycontin case had been brought because Purdue Pharma had downplayed the dangers and addictive nature of the painkiller. Between 2000 and 2001, it was blamed for 146 deaths and may have been responsible for as many as 318 others. Despite Elston's call, Brownlee went through with the plea deal which included the company pleading guilty to one felony and being fined $635 million. Three former executives also pled guilty to misdemeanors. This was actually a fairly light punishment seeing as the company had made billions off Oxycontin and none of the executives pled to felonies. 8 days after the settlement, Brownlee's name appeared on a list kept by Elston of US Attorneys to be fired. In the event, Brownlee kept his job.

230. According to a GAO report of July 31, 2007 up to December 2005 there was no centralized system of records to track equipment transfers to Iraqi security forces. While the commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command- Iraq (MNSTC-I ) in 2004-2005 a certain David Petraeus reported that "about 185,000 AK-47 rifles, 170,000 pistols, 215,000 items of body armor, and 140,000 helmets were issued to Iraqi security forces as of September 2005," "the MNSTC-I property books contain records for only about 75,000 AK-47 rifles, 90,000 pistols, 80,000 items of body armor, and 25,000 helmets." This results in a discrepancy of "about 110,000 AK-47 rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor, and 115,000 helmets reported as issued to Iraqi forces as of September 22, 2005." Petraeus called it a clerical error but it is likely that much of this equipment ended up in the hands of militias, making Petraeus, not Iran, the biggest illicit arms supplier in Iraq.

231. Another upside-down nomination. David Palmer a DOJ careerist was nominated by Bush on September 15, 2006 to chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Palmer is chief of the Employment Litigation section in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division. 8 of his colleagues wrote a letter to the Senate committee overseeing his nomination in which they noted that Palmer was not much of a lawyer, did not understand the principles of Title VII and constitutional law which served as the basis of the section's activities, and was himself the subject of a complaint of employee abuse. When he became section head, he treated people badly and morale and productivity plummeted. After 11 months, Palmer withdrew his nomination over the weekend of August 4-5, 2007.

232. And another. Peter Kirsanow an arch-conservative opponent of affirmative action was named on December 6, 2001 by direct appointment to a 6 year term on the Civil Rights Commission by President Bush. The appointment was contested but ultimately confirmed by the DC Court of Appeals in May 2002. On July 19, 2002, Kirsanow said that if there were another terrorist attack, "you can forget civil rights in this country" and that if it came from a certain ethnic community "I think we will have a return to Korematsu." (Korematsu was the Supreme Court decision validating the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II). As a Civil Rights Commissioner, he had a report critical of Bush's civil rights record removed from the commission's site and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of the Supreme Court nominations of both John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

....On November 16, 2005 and again on February 10, 2006, he was nominated to the National Labor Relations Board. He was given a recess appointment by Bush on January 4, 2006. Kirsanow's labor background is that of an anti-union attorney opposed to the minimum wage.

233. In the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 which Bush signed into law on March 9, 2006, death penalty advocates included language which stripped federal judges from determining if states in death penalty cases had provided defendants with adequate legal counsel. The act gave this power instead to the Attorney General. In Texas, Alberto Gonzales then Governor Bush‚s general counsel from 1994-1997 was known for his skimpy, biased clemency recommendations in capital cases. DOJ regulations on this issue are due to take effect in late summer 2007.

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Clinton got ousted for a blow job, nobody died, nobody got hurt but Hillary and kids, this should be another scandal.

Conclusion:

So what's wrong with today's media corpSE? Why have they been so MUTE about ALL these UN-reported and UN-investigated "Bush-Gates"? WHY?? Did Bush threaten to take their White House Reporting Privileges away, if they openly report about any of these scandals?

Very Polite Press Corp Has No Guts Today

Back during Watergate, when Nixon would hold a press conference, Sam Donaldson and Helen Thomas, along with others, would ask Nixon tough questions. Once Nixon tried to get around an answer, and Donaldson responded to Nixon, "Hold on Mr. President"!!

Donaldson didn't just go after Republican Nixon. He also went after President Carter, President Reagan, President Bush #1 and President Clinton. He held each President's "feet" to the fire. Today's media corpSE could learn plenty form Donaldson, but they refuse.

Only in Ireland do they try that today. When Bush had a one-on-one interview with an Irish reporter, on his trip to Europe in 2004, the women reporter (Carole Coleman) was not afraid to stop Bush in mid-sentence when she heard a lie.

Irish Reporter Throws Real Hardball Questions At Bush

Irish Reporter Didn't Get Memo To Ask Puffball Questions

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CONSPIRACIES BY SPOILED KIDS TO SCREW THE MIDDLE CLASS AND KILL THE POOR

Fun Links

One Thousand Reasons (1500 now) George Bush Sucks

From American's, like senators, representatives & Concerned citizens who still give a shit about our country.  who still care about freedom & have some balls to take on the corruption that threatens our country, the terrorists within.

Keith Olbermann TELLS BUSH HE BLOWS - YOU GO BOY

From the Ass of the Asshole in Deciderly his own words

"The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th." -- George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., July 12, 2007
(That is scary, did Bush just have a Freudian Slip and admit that he bombed the 9/11 towers and Pentagon)

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"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." --interview with CBS News' Katie Couric, Sept. 6, 2006

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"My job is a job to make decisions. I'm a decision -- if the job description were, what do you do -- it's decision maker." --George W. Bush, Tipp City, Ohio, April 19, 2007

"Iraq is a very important part of securing the homeland, and it's a very important part of helping change the Middle East into a part of the world that will not serve as a threat to the civilized world, to people like -- or to the developed world, to people like -- in the United States." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 3, 2007

"Suiciders are willing to kill innocent life in order to send the projection that this is an impossible mission." --George W. Busy, Washington, D.C., April 3, 2007

"And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it." --George W. Bush, interview on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007

"The best way to defeat the totalitarian of hate is with an ideology of hope -- an ideology of hate -- excuse me --with an ideology of hope." --George W. Bush, Fort Benning, Ga., Jan. 11, 2007

"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.'' —Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001

"Tribal sovereignty means that; it's sovereign. I mean, you're a — you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And therefore the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities." —Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 2004 (Watch video clip)

"I couldn't imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah." —at a White House menorah lighting ceremony, Washington, D.C., Dec. 10, 2001

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." —State of the Union Address, Jan. 28, 2003, making a claim that administration officials knew at the time to be false

"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him." —Washington, D.C., Sept. 13, 2001

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." —Washington, D.C., March 13, 2002

"Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?" --George W. Bush, Florence, South Carolina, Jan. 11, 2000

"Can we win? I don't think you can win it." —after being asked whether the war on terror was winnable, "Today" show interview, Aug. 30, 2004

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace." —Washington, D.C. June 18, 2002

"I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." —to a group of Amish he met with privately, July 9, 2004

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." —speaking underneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, May 1, 2003

“We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories … And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them." —Washington, D.C., May 30, 2003

I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense." --Washington, D.C. April 18, 2006 (Read more; listen to audio clip; watch video clip)

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." —Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004 (Watch video clip)

"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002 (Watch video clip)

Best Bush Sucks Music Video

Best Bush Sucks Roast By Stephen Colbert at Presidential Press Conference

Unedited Version - click link

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879&q=stephen+colbert&total=2272&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Best Bush Sucks Latin American Music Video - for all our Latino friends who do the jobs American's don't want to and have done excellent work, who are now being flogged for helping us do those jobs, with a title of "illegal" aka cheap labor.  We are sorry for the current view expressed by our leadership gone mad.

Best Bush Absolutely Wrong but Righteous

Bush Sucks Music Video

Bush - Hu's on First

Best Bush Sucks Impersonator

More Bush Impersonation

Best Dude Telling Bush - YOU SUCK

Best Bush Suck Country Western Video

Lil Bush on Bush (watch the infomercial after each segment for continuous laughs)

Donald Trump - George Bush Sucks Worse Than Any President Ever
(used to dislike Trump but he earns your heart here)

Bush v. Zomies aka Cheney's

The Real Karl Rove - "Bites the Heads off Small Animals" - Grandpa Rove built gas chambers for Hitler.  Bloodline should be extincted on Ebonics first and worst to go basis. 

Bush Regime Lies on Iraq WMD's
If no WMD's  = Bush Cheney, Rummy, Condi, You & Me are all war criminals.
Perhaps we should kill Joe & Valerie Plame Wilson before anyone finds out the truth.

"I Don't Need Your War Machines ~ I Don't Need Your Ghetto Scenes"

Table of Horror

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